New bats don’t mean changing baseball

PING!

The sound many college baseball fans are accustomed to hearing. And up until recent years many college baseball fans watched many of things “pings” turn into a lot of runs.

Like, tons of runs.

At the start of the century final scores at Rosenblatt looked more like something you’d see across the state at Memorial Stadium – home of the Nebraska Cornhuskers football team.

In the 2000 College World Series, the total runs scored was a little more than 11 runs per game. And the NCAA took note. They turned to chemistry to solve the problem.

But, while technology is working wonders, even in 2010 after a decade of massaging the formula, that number was down to just over 10.

And this season, after further tweaking, they think they have found the right blend. The Associated Press reported games were “quicker” with “dramatically lower” run totals.

But, reports differ across the boards. This past weekend (31 games) the scores averaged about 10 runs per game – hovering right around the average for last years CWS.

The Associated Press reported “some of the biggest fans of the new bats are Major League Baseball scouts.”

And that may still be true. These bats give players more Major League-like hitting ability. Think of it, like taking a little bit of air out of a long, fly ball. It changes it from a homerun to a pop-out.

But to say the bats have affected the games run totals is a bad generalization. There are a lot of teams in different conferences that play different baseball.

Texas- Pan American, for example, has scored more than five runs in all but three games since the start of April. Oregon State, has scored more than five runs in all but five games since the start of March.

And Chicago State has reached a double-digit run total five times – half of the games played – in April.

For The Associated Press to report “the college variation of the game resembles real baseball for the first time in years,” might be true, but taking every individual at-bat and extrapolating that games are faster and lower-scoring might be a little bit of a stretch.