The first-ever Pac-12 baseball tournament concludes Sunday afternoon, capping one of the sport’s most chaotic and memorable weeks of competition.
And none of that should have happened.
UCLA baseball was at the center of all this chaos and became the poster child for the madness that was unfolding in Scottsdale, Arizona. The Bruins opened Wednesday with a game against Cal that started at 10:15 p.m. and ended at 1:26 a.m. and then had another game to play against Washington less than 12 hours later.
After winning that contest to stay in the hunt, UCLA came back to face Cal and won that second matchup in extra innings. The Bruins’ next game was certainly their most memorable as they came back after nine runs at the bottom of the ninth to force extra innings and eventually beat Oregon State 25-22.
The win forced a doubleheader, and though UCLA came back to take another late lead, Oregon State eventually pulled away to advance to Sunday’s championship game.
For all the drama, intrigue, and viral moments, what stood out most was that the baseball played was far from world class and the whole ordeal felt like an afterthought.
The Bruins at-bats were all but silenced in the first game of the night against the Golden Bears, then they went on to score 55 points over the next four games against downed and/or gassed opposing teams. UCLA pitchers, meanwhile, allowed 49 runs during the week, or nearly 10 per game.
Injuries certainly played a role in the Bruins’ inability to keep opponents off the scoreboard – Max Rajcic, Thatcher Hurd, Gage Jump, Jared Karros and Jake Brooks were all out, robbing coach John Savage of his top five starting pitchers – but it was a problem, that virtually every team faced. Freshman shortstop Cody Schrier and freshman outfielder Malakhi Knight were also absent, awarding blue and gold to two of their future stars.
Many of the top contributors on the mound and on home plate were players who had appeared little, if at all, that season, and UCLA still managed to grab a few outs while playing in the title game. That’s great and certainly a source of optimism as the NCAA Regionals approach, but in terms of the tangible value the tournament offers, the pros don’t seem to outweigh the cons.
Reports of the Pac-12 adding a conference tournament first surfaced a few years ago, but it didn’t become official until the summer of 2021. The first view of the case was chaotic, from the system to a field that led to countless weather-delayed starts at Scottsdale Times, resulting in game temperatures reaching 100 degrees.
The reported average attendance for UCLA’s five games was 2,688, but the stands looked much emptier on TV. Scottsdale Stadium seats 12,000 and no game has come close to that attendance.
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Broadcasting all games on Pac-12 Networks also limited long-distance viewership, as large parts of the country and even the west coast were notoriously unable to subscribe to the channel. Even if they had access to it, the leaderboards for games that happen after midnight might not have been great anyway.
Forcing these games to be played at absurd times with impossibly short rest periods felt like the conference was just ticking boxes to get through the weekend. Things are bound to be messy the first time around, but it was a flawed system from the start.
Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff took pride in the poor pitching, overruns and overuse of the players going into Sunday’s championship game, and someone might be twisting his exact same stats to make an argument for the event being a failure was.
It’s too late for the Pac-12 to turn back now – the cat is out of the bag, Pandora’s box has been opened and so on. To be perfectly honest, the conference didn’t have much of a choice as every other Power Conference and even most mid-majors had organized tournaments long before them.
From a financial and general point of view, the Pac-12 was – as usual – left in the dust. It just so happens that in their attempt to catch up, they have fallen headlong into one of the most flawed and wasteful systems in college sports.
All to change a few car offerings and supposedly improve the RPI of power conference teams. Well, the Bruins went 51-46 after their five games, but playing a three-game streak against a single conference opponent could have produced the same result.
The NCAA and their conferences created these tournaments as a supplemental revenue stream, but until the exact figures for the Pac-12 are released the jury is still out on whether or not they’ve managed to create one. This blind pursuit of profit isn’t good for the players, the coaches, or the quality of the games being played, and while it can provide some sparks of relevance over the weekend, it doesn’t seem to pay off in-game. ,together. There’s a reason Coach John Savage has went against the idea on the case in the past several times.
While these conference tournaments are almost impossible to get rid of, changing the format is the least supervisors and administrators can do. Instead of eight teams in the range, maybe six; consider abandoning double elimination; Perhaps choose a city with two stadiums nearby to avoid scheduling problems and delays, or a city not known for its scorching heat.
In an ideal world, conference tournaments don’t exist, but since that’s not going to happen anytime soon, it’s up to Kliavkoff and his colleagues to consult and come up with a better version in the future.
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