The Big West Conference is showing signs of a return to the status it once enjoyed in college baseball.
It’s too bad Hawaii won’t be around much longer to be a part of it.
On July 1, 2026, the Rainbows move to the Mountain West Conference, so the ’Bows have two more chances to win the Big West for the first time before bidding aloha — starting with today’s first-round tournament game that amounts to a play-in against UC Santa Barbara.
If UH is to do it this year, it must negotiate a tougher path than the three teams that don’t start play until Thursday.
If the ’Bows get past the Gauchos, they face a major challenge Thursday going up against UC Irvine (39-13), which is ranked 20th in the nation by D1baseball.com.
The good news for Hawaii fans is the ’Bows won two of the three games they played against UCSB this season. The bad news is they were swept by Irvine by a combined score of 12-1 in three games.
There’s more good news, though: If Hawaii beats UCSB, it would still be alive if it then lost to Irvine. After the UH-UCSB game today, the tournament becomes double-elimination.
So, like Sunday’s regular-season finale against UC San Diego, this No. 4 vs. No. 5 seed battle is an elimination game.
When Hawaii joined the Big West in time for the 2013 baseball season, I was among those excited to see how the Rainbows would fare in a conference where if baseball wasn’t king it was at least a high-ranking prince, since there’s no football.
Although Kolten Wong had left for the pros after 2011, UH’s last year in the WAC included some fun times. The ’Bows went 30-25 in ’12, including winning two out of three in the regular season against Fresno State, which featured a giant five-tool player named Aaron Judge.
Judge went 4-for-5, including a triple, in the Bulldogs’ 8-2 win in the Rainbows’ first game of their last WAC Tournament. LaTech finished off Hawaii, 9-6, the next day, and it was good bye WAC, hello Big West.
Now, today is the first time UH baseball is in a postseason tournament in 13 years … because the Big West hasn’t held one since the 1990s.
Even though the Big West had seen better days by 2013, I was intrigued by UH’s possibilities in a conference with so much baseball tradition. I also figured that shorter road trips would help the Rainbows.
My optimism proved to be misplaced.
UH went 86-125 in the Big West and 192-239 overall from 2013 to 2021. The corresponding winning percentages are .448 and .408. Hawaii had two overall winning seasons in that span, and that’s counting 11-6 in COVID-19 shortened 2020. The ’Bows never had a winning record in conference those first nine years.
But in the past four years, Hawaii is 73-47 (.608) in the Big West and 127-79 (.617) overall. Whether we are talking conference or overall, every record is a winning one since 2022.
This time my optimism was well-founded, with the coaching change that brought Rich Hill to Manoa between the 2021 and 2022 seasons.
The Big West has two baseball national championships — both by Cal State Fullerton. Many baseball fans in Hawaii remember the second one, in 2004. That’s because the Titans were led by catcher Kurt Suzuki from Baldwin High on Maui, who got the game-winning hit when the Titans beat Texas in the College World Series championship game. Suzuki won what was then called the Johnny Bench Award (best catcher in NCAA Division I baseball, now called The Buster Posey Award) and the Brooks Wallace Award (best player in college baseball, now awarded to the best shortstop). In 2022, Suzuki completed a 16-year Major League career that included an All-Star game and a World Series championship.
Is it out of the question for an entire team of players representing Hawaii to reach the heights of a national championship, or a least a return to the NCAA regionals?
It would be a longshot for the ’Bows this year. And UH is leaving the Big West after next season.
But I think it’s safe to say Hill — even though he’s in his 60s — might not peak until he and the ’Bows get to the Mountain.
