Cal reinstates three sports, but not baseball

Cal's a pretty good school, too. And Cal's better players could also have played for Stanford. Don't kid yourself on that. Will any of them end up making that transfer after this season? I have no idea. But the top-line Cal guys will land at good baseball schools.

 

I am aware of Cal's academic reputation; I am also aware that, try as they might, Old Blues aren't fooling anyone into believing those high academic standards apply to the athletes as well. (OK I guess they're fooling some people into believing that.)

 

First don't hate on Cal because my brother is a Cal Bear engineering physics grad and he'll design some worm hole or something to swallow you up because that's what Cal engineering physicists do. But I digress.

The point is, the notion that nobody at Cal can play at Stanford is absurd. Heck, I used to cover teams in the Sun Belt and Southland Conferences and I guarantee you that every team in those leagues had players who not only could play in the SEC and the Big 12, but play well. Baseball has more parity than any sport because of 11.7 scholarships.

Let me ask you this. You are a ballplayer and Stanford offers you books plus a little tuition money and Cal offers you books and room and board. You're a smart kid so you get the tuition assistance from the state (is it still free there?) so basically you are getting a full ride.

So where does the kid go, Stanford or Cal?

This happens down south with kids turning down small scholarships to an LSU or an Alabama to go to a Troy or a UL-Lafayette for a full ride, or close to a full ride. Why wouldn't it happen there? Baseball scholarships are far more complex than that.

Here's an example. People down south may remember Wade LeBlanc at Alabama and now with the Padres. He was a stud coming out of high school and was freshman all-American for Jim Wells. What you might not know is he SIGNED with McNeese State out of the Southland Conference his senior year. What happened was LSU was slow playing him and offering him a partial and McNeese offered him a full ride and he took it. And believe me, this kid was no project. He was a polished draft project playing for a perennial national top 25 high school program. He just went with the money.

But when McNeese's coach left to become Wells' top assistant at Alabama, he got out of his LOI and went to Tuscaloosa with McNeese's old coach.

Now, in what other sport can that happen?

 

Ok. Point stipulated that Cal has some good baseball players. Still, none will transfer to Stanford.

Back to the point of the thread: There is always so much hand-wringing when a school drops a baseball program. It's like it wakes the THIS IS UN-AMERICAN reflex. My wife came home today saying "can you believe Cal is dropping baseball?" When I explained that college baseball is a lily-white sport of privilege that nobody on campus gives a crap about, she wondered why this was even controversial.

And before I get the "but women's gymnastics doesn't matter either!" response, I do not argue with that point, but as I and others have said repeatedly, Title IX renders that argument irrelevant.

 

Again, please. Do you really think that 90 percent of Stanford's football players are not special admits to that school as well? Or do you really think they had a 4.4 high school GPA and the extracurriculars the non-athlete student must have to be admitted to Stanford (or Cal, or any UC school, essentially).

And the last national-championship baseball team I covered was so lilly-white and privileged it started an African-American in center field, Asian-Americans at second base, shortstop and at DH, and the son of a dead drug-addict mom at catcher.

You don't like college baseball, we get it. I can assure you, however, that in the SEC, the ACC, at at least half the Big 12 and in half of the Pac-10, and in the Big West, it's a big deal.

Cal kids may not transfer to Stanford because A, Cal athletes generally really, really dislike Stanford, and B, because Stanford generally doesn't take transfers, although in the case of a discontinued program they have an easy out to break with university tradition.

But to suggest they're unqualified academically or competitively for Stanford is to be grossly uninformed.

 

No, Stanford athletes don't meet the rest of the university's standards. But they're about 200-300 SAT points above Cal's.

As for racial composition, according to this link, of the 269 players in the 2010 College World Series, eight were black.

http://www.examiner.com/mlb-in-national/moneyball-the-ncaa-and-race-baseball-is-the-victim

 

And unless you're black, you're automatically lilly-white and rich?

We'll just have to agree to disagree.

 

If you're in the position to get a college baseball scholarship, there is a very good chance your parents have spent in excess of $50,000 on your baseball training, and in a very large number of cases that number would be above $100,000.

 

Then I guess the players I covered for 20 years were far poorer, more diverse and not as well trained in their teens as the average college scholarship player.

 

Baseball has become a country club sport, there's no doubt. It's still a shame that in an area where there is such an obvious demand for college baseball in a participatory sense, a major university would drop the sport.

 

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If this is true - and it's not, at least in my area - what does that make college men's and women's soccer, or lacrosse, sports that cost far more money for year-round club training and travel teams?

 

They don't cost far more money. They cost about the same. Baseball is also a year-round travel sport now, with private lessons too especially for pitchers. Most I've heard is a family that spent $18K on play and travel when their son was 12.

College baseball is also hurt by the fact that the best players in the age group are and have always been in the minor leagues. Yes college is a viable path to the majors, but shit, Madison Bumgarner pitched Game 4 of the World Series last year. He would be a college senior.

Can't really say why men's soccer makes the cut, but for women's soccer, see my previous comments on Title IX.