If you’re anywhere from Kentucky to Maine on Tuesday, you may have noticed that the weather is not all that conducive for baseball, what with all the snow. Look, here’s Fenway Park in Boston:
This is an annual problem for many college baseball teams in the country’s northern areas, seeing as how their seasons started last weekend. But one college coach wants to fix this with a solution that seems almost too easy: He wants to move the NCAA baseball season to the summer months.
For West Virginia Coach Randy Mazey, it’s a simple matter of fairness. College teams in southern and western states — you know, the teams that annually dominate college baseball — get a huge edge over everyone else because they can practice outdoors as usual. Meanwhile, snowbound northern teams are stuck practicing in indoor facilities, where re-creating the game environment isn’t exactly easy.
Mazey talked with the Tribune Review’s Jerry DiPaola while on a bus to South Carolina, where his team will open the season on Friday against Clemson. In fact, the Mountaineers will play their first 17 games on the road — traveling to places such as Clemson, Georgia Southern, Myrtle Beach for a tournament, East Tennessee State, Liberty and the University of Texas — before playing their home opener on March 17.
“It’s literally unfair for half the country,” Mazey said, adding that he has received 37 responses from his fellow Power-5 coaches to his proposal, with 31 agreeing with him.
DiPaola has more on the possible repercussions of such a move:
The proposal likely needs the endorsement of Major League Baseball, which would be forced to move its draft from early June to later in the summer. Other potential problems could include disruption of some players’ internships and summer jobs and the necessity of feeding and housing players on campus long past the end of the winter and spring semesters.
Mazey’s proposal, which he has not yet presented to the NCAA, would delay the start of the season until late April or early May, with the College World Series played in August, he said.
One supporter is Pittsburgh Coach Joe Jordano, whose team practice outside a grand total of three times before starting the season last weekend at a tournament in Florida. “If you told a basketball team you can practice on a regular-sized court three times prior to playing your first game, they would look at you like you have four heads,” Jordano told DiPaola. “But in baseball, especially northern baseball, that’s our reality.”
After spending the first 17 years of his Post career writing and editing, Matt and the printed paper had an amicable divorce in 2014. He's now blogging and editing for the Early Lead and the Post's other Web-based products.
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