Ben has been hating a lot on college baseball the last few days. I think he’s started to turn the corner after spending some time at Russo Park over the weekend (by the way, if you haven’t been there yet, get your keister over there ASAP), but I’d like to bring my point of view to it.
College baseball is one of my favorite sports of all-time and there’s two reasons why. I’ll call it The Two P’s: Purity and Parity.
Purity
We look at the world of college baseball and you can see the sport being played at it’s purest form. You’ve got no instant replay for the most part (even though Cajuns fans could’ve used that yesterday), and no changes to speed up the pace of play.
A lot of the purists when it comes to professional baseball haven’t been the biggest fans of these changes, along with the brashness of the sport thanks to the international flavor that’s been added into the sport over the last 15-20 years. Those fans have that alternative and even fans of just baseball will enjoy it.
The phrase purity takes on a double meaning though because it’s never really mired in controversy behind the scenes like college basketball is dealing with right now.
Parity
We always talk about the old cliché “any given Sunday”, but you know that in any other sport, you’ll see the prohibitive favorite beat the little sisters of the poor 9 times out of 10. You can’t really say that with baseball. Just look at the last two weeks for LSU and the Cajuns. The Cajuns have been highly touted as one of the better teams in the Sun Belt and are consistently ranked in the top 25 headed into the season.
What other sport can you see the Cajuns beating programs like LSU or Mississippi State? Or looking at the other side of the aisle, when can you see a program like UNO beat the Tigers in the Box? There’s nothing else like it when it comes to college sports!
-Clint Domingue