re: "College baseball is not a big sport" – By the Data

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When’s the last time you had a deep conversation with someone about college baseball?

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Literally earlier this week. With multiple people. I'll let them know that they're also suffering from "living in a bubble"

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Can anybody irl name 5 college baseball players?

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I mean, aside from the professionals that cover the sport, including those that are employed by very big media conglomerates like ESPN, yes. I could probably name you the anticipated starting 9 of the longhorns this year even though they lost 7/9 starters after last season and could probably name at least 2 or 3 from each team in the Big 12 and most of the SEC teams.

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What other sports are you comparing baseball to over that time period? Women's volleyball?

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Literally whatever college sport is being played April - June (Volleyball typically concludes in December, btw)

They get put on ESPN while the men get put on ESPN 2.

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Ole Miss turns a profit in baseball, and I'm pretty sure State and LSU do as well.

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OM state Arky LSU Vandy and South Carolina all turned a profit according to the article

I can tell you this much, programs around the country aren't spending tens of millions of dollars on state of the art stadiums and facilities rivaling the nicest minor league parks if nobody cares about the sport. Even largely dead programs like Alabama have spent 60+ million on brand new stadiums. College baseball has growth immensely decade to decade. And you can see the quality of the product reflected in the MLB draft. Here's a year-to-year comparison of college players drafted in the 1st round the past 10 drafts (not including JUCO players but including compensatory and balance round players)

2022: 19/39
2021: 16/36
2020: 24/37(the first 7 picks were all from college)
2019: 27/41
2018: 20/43 (top 5 all from college)
2017: 19/36
2016: 21/41
2015: 20/42
2014: 21/41
2013: 21/39

Total: 208/395 (53%)

Now compare that to the 90s:

1999: 24/51
1998: 21/43
1997: 23/52
1996: 13/35
1995: 13/30
1994: 12/28
1993: 13/28
1992: 24/38
1991: 21/44
1990: 16/40

Total: 180/389 (46%)

And none of that addresses how many 1st round picks the past 10 years have not signed and gone to college, a number that has also increased

We can even look at the 2021 All-MLB team to see the types of players coming from college ball now. The 2021 All-MLB team had 1 player at each position (3 outfielders), a DH, 5 starting pitchers, and 2 relief pitchers. So 16 total players. Of those 16 players, 6 played college baseball, 2 played JUCO only, 5 were international players, and 3 went straight from high school in the US to professional baseball.

The all MLB team is only a few years old, so let's compare that to the silver sluggers from 1990. There are 8 position players and 1 DH. Not a single one of those guys played college baseball. The Cy Young award winner that year, Bob Welch, did go to college.

I think with the advent of NIL and the elite training/coaching these players are now getting at the college level, you'll see these numbers continue to grow. And I'd be willing to bet the quality of players will be much higher in this conference than anywhere else. If people like baseball but have some irrational dislike of college baseball, then it's their loss honestly.

This article sums things up pretty well (from 2019)

https://www.baseballamerica.com/stories/draft-system-has-pushed-teams-to-pick-more-college-players/

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The 2019 MLB draft reinforced that teams are prioritizing college players at a higher level than ever before.

Fifty-one of the 78 total selections on the first day of this year’s draft came out of four-year college programs, or roughly 65.4 percent of the pre-third round draft pool. That is the second-highest rate of four-year players selected in that portion of the draft. Only the 1981 draft (69.2 percent) is higher, and that was at a time when junior college players were selected in a separate January draft.

But it’s not just the top of the draft in which teams have begun prioritizing and drafting college players. It’s throughout the top 10 rounds, and it’s through the entirety of Day 3 as well.

Since the late 1990s there’s been a steadily increasing trend of teams selecting more and more college players, and it comes at the expense of the high school and junior college prospects. That’s true of drafted players overall, as well as players who are drafted and signed.

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In the last five drafts, the percentage of signed draftees coming out of four-year schools has ranged from 75.5 to 78.3 percent. The 2015 draft saw 715 college players sign contracts, the most of any draft from 1981 to 2018, despite that year's draft only having the fifth-most total signees in that same time frame.

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There are a number of reasons for this trend. Multiple teams have told Baseball America that they are more prone to pass on high school pitchers at the top of the draft because of the recent struggles of that demographic. And teams have a much more robust dataset for college players thanks to a deeper statistical resume and troves of analytical data from Trackman, etc., to a depth that isn't possible to acquire with high school players. Both of those reasons can push teams to take more college players. The increase in college players taken in the first two rounds this year would seem to indicate there is something to this trend.

But there's another reason that is also speeding up the trend. The current draft system has created an environment that leads teams to sign college players instead of high school players. There’s an obvious jump in the percentage of college players that occurs in 2012, which accounts for the current CBA in which teams aggressively take college seniors in rounds six through 10 in order to create more financial flexibility under the current slotting system.

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Chart of the top 10 rounds of the draft from 1960-2018

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In the SEC it’s a big sport. Not so much elsewhere

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It's program top heavy in the Big 12. Texas, TCU, Texas Tech and Oklahoma State (and every now and then Baylor) care a great deal. The rest of the teams: not so much. I think the same sentiment applies for the top 3 or 4 programs in each of the Pac-12 and ACC.

Iowa State hasn't even had a baseball team since the late 90s

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They get put on ESPN while the men get put on ESPN 2.

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They're also getting all prime-time slots Wednesday-Friday. Last year, the title-clinching game of the CWS was on Sunday at 2:30 PM CST. Putting a game on in the middle of the day in the summer on a Sunday is just asking for poor ratings.

The most watched mens CWS final series ever was in 2009 with a 3 game average of 1.92 million viewers and game 3 with 2.76 viewers. All three of those games were in primetime on ESPN Monday-Wednesday

The most watched womens CWS final series ever was last year with a 1.6 million series average and a peak of 2.1 million for the clinching game 2.

The past 8 years, the mens CWS title series has averaged 1.626 million viewers.

The past 5 years (same website only had last 5 for womens), the womens CWS title series has averaged 1.606 million viewers.

I mean it's definitely close, but the men have still, on average, had more viewers in less ideal day/time slots. hell, some of the womens CWS games have even been on ABC. And the in-person attendance for NCAAT and CWS games isn't even close. Last year, 366K fans attended the CWS in Omaha compared to 115k for the women.

And as someone else has already mentioned, womens collegiate sports are the mecca for almost every sport. Collegiate sports for men, conversely, are almost exclusively the first step before they become professionals. College baseball is competing with MLB teams playing at the same time for consistent eyeballs. Softball doesn't have that problem.

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dont give a shite what the rest of the country thinks, college baseball is fantastic.

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It's also a regional sport. Baseball is always going to be bigger in the southern half of the country because it starts in February.

They don’t call it Americas pastime off of data LMAO

Very true