Baseball still a sport where NCAA ‘have-nots’ have shots

Take a good look around at the NCAA Division I baseball tournament that is underway, because it is something of an anachronism in major college sports these days.

It is one of the few widely visible sports where the have-not schools still have a chance to contend for a championship.

A slim one, but a chance nonetheless.

That’s more than can be said for a lot of other sports these days.

In how many other pursuits can Stony Brook and Kent State make a run, as they did in getting to Omaha, site of the College World Series, in 2012?

This year, Kennesaw State (hint: the Fighting Owls are in Georgia) advanced to the super regionals Monday, having knocked out Alabama. Meanwhile, the College of Charleston is moving along, too, stepping over Florida, among others.

Kennesaw took two out of three from Alabama, while regional host Florida State disappeared faster than you could say Tallahassee. Meanwhile, Florida rarely loses in its own Gainesville, Fla., backyard to anybody, much less to a program without a pedigree.

EVER SINCE the advent of the Bowl Championship Series for football in 1998, which effectively routed hundreds of millions of dollars into schools from the BCS automatic qualifying conferences (Pac-12, Big Ten, Big 12, Southeastern and Atlantic Coast conferences), there has been a deepening divide between the haves and have-nots in Division I.

The haves have had the major moolah to pour into facilities, coaching salaries and recruiting in sports far beyond football. The have-nots, dimes on the dollar.

Which is why the well-heeled SEC had 10 of its 14 members in the 64-team tournament this year, a record for one conference. There are 31 Division I baseball playing conferences and four of them (SEC, Pac-12, Big 12 and ACC) comprised 42 percent of the teams in the tournament field.

Not by coincidence, national titles in all but a handful of sports have been noticeably thinning for the have-nots.

In women’s volleyball, women’s basketball and softball, for example, BCS teams have won national titles for the past 15 years (other then UConn winning this year in its first season out of the formerly BCS Big East).

IN BASEBALL, meanwhile, Fresno State won the 2008 title, one of three non-BCS types to win championships in the sport in a six-year span. No non-BCS conference member has won a baseball title since the Bulldogs, but as Kennesaw State and College of Charleston underline, there is still some hope. A couple of good pitchers and some solid defense can still take you a long way.

A couple of rule changes have helped in that regard. Dialing back the power of aluminum bats has moved the game away from the days of 21-14 "gorilla ball" scores and given teams with pitching and defense a chance to compete again. So, too, has the NCAA limiting roster size, which has made more players available.

In baseball, the playing field might not be all that level, but it isn’t as precipitous as a lot of others where NCAA titles are contested these days.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.