Baseball

Tennessee Clings To No. 1, Three Teams Enter • D1Baseball

Published

2 years ago

May 9, 2022

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Top Stories
D1 Baseball Staff – May 9, 2022

>> SCORES: Friday | Saturday | Sunday
>> THE DEAN’S LIST: Teams That Aced Week 12
>> HOW THE TOP 25 FARED
>> LATEST RPI
>> TOP 25 CHAT

Despite losing its first weekend series of the year on the road at Kentucky, Tennessee held onto the No. 1 spot in the D1Baseball Top 25 rankings. At 42-6, the Volunteers still have college baseball’s best record and No. 1 RPI ranking, and their 20-4 mark in SEC play is still seven games better than the No. 2 team in their division, and four games better than SEC West leader Arkansas. No. 2 Oregon State swept Oregon to improve to 5-0 on the season against the rival Ducks, but Tennessee still has more high-end wins against regional-caliber opposition, headlined by road sweeps of Florida and Vanderbilt, a home sweep of Georgia Southern, a home series win against Auburn and a 2-1 showing against Big 12 opponents at the Shriners College Classic.

The top six teams remained the same, with the second-ranked Beavers followed by No. 3 Oklahoma State, No. 4 Arkansas, No. 5 Virginia Tech and No. 6 Miami. Louisville jumped three spots to No. 7 following a 2-1-1 week on the road against solid competition, with a midweek win at Vanderbilt and a 1-1-1 series at Wake Forest. Stanford also climbed three places to No. 8 after a 4-0 week punctuated by a sweep of rival California. Texas Tech held steady at No. 9, and Texas A&M moved up three spots to No. 10 after a series win against South Carolina.

Big West power UC Santa Barbara made the week’s biggest jump, up six spots to No. 19 after a 3-1 week that included a road series win at UC Irvine. Southern Miss (down seven to No. 14 after its second straight series loss) and UCLA (down 15 places to No. 23 after a rough 0-4 week against teams with losing records) were the week’s biggest fallers.

Three teams entered the Top 25 this week. Preseason No. 1 Texas returned to the rankings at No. 22 after winning a road series at West Virginia. Another preseason top-five team, Vanderbilt, re-joined the rankings at No. 24 on the heels of a road series win at then-No. 22 Georgia, which fell out of the Top 25. And Grand Canyon made its season debut in the rankings at No. 25 after a 3-1 week that included a midweek win against Arizona.

Georgia Tech, Georgia and TCU dropped out of the Top 25.

D1Baseball editors and national writers determine the Top 25 rankings.

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Baseball

The Ouch List: Week Nine • D1Baseball

Published

5 hours ago

April 16, 2024

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Vanderbilt had a head-in-their-hands kind of week.

Columns
Eric Sorenson – April 16, 2024

NEW YORK — Yo. You freakin’ kiddin’ me here? The tickets on the Pain Train were flying off the shelf this week as we had a wicked-yuge ton of candidates ready to take their seats, but capacity was set at 10 for this bumpy ride so we’ll stick with that number moving forward here. And it’s just as well because I am currently in New York City and like a typical New Yawkah, I’m not in any mood to suffer fools today. If you impede the progress of the Pain Train, you’re quite likely to get a Bronx cheer or[…]

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Baseball

Mystery Meat! – The Schoch Factor Podcast • D1Baseball

Published

6 hours ago

April 16, 2024

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The Schoch Factor
Stephen Schoch – April 16, 2024

On this episode of The Schoch Factor Podcast, Stephen Schoch, Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman discuss Weekend 9 of the 2024 college baseball season, beginning with Steve’s interesting visit to ECU. On this trip Steve, was able to catch the No. 1 club baseball team in the nation as ECU took on No. 3 NC State. Following that, he headed over to the Charlotte-ECU game, where he found a free chicken tender on the way to the stadium that left Jake with a lot of questions – questions that he gets the answers to on this episode.

Following the free nugget discourse, the guys get into some of the biggest matchups from last week and give a nod to Texas A&M on being the new No. 1 team in the nation. Then we get into some of our favorite moments of the week and close it out with some drivers ed and NASCAR education from Jake! We have all that and more coming right up!

02:28 Club Baseball Adventures and Unexpected Encounters
05:48 The Chicken Supreme Incident: A Deep Dive
16:37 Diving Into the SEC: Surprises and Standouts
26:02 Wake Forest’s Resurgence and Tennessee’s Power Duo
33:34 ECU Concession Stand Review: The Pirate Dog Experience
37:33 Favorite Moments of the Week: Turkey Incident and Baseball Highlights
41:56 Exploring Unique Baseball Stories and Highlights
43:36 Coach Mazey’s Generous Offer at Buffalo Wild Wings
47:22 Celebrating College Baseball Achievements and Oddities
48:47 Billy Amick’s Impressive Return Post-Appendectomy
54:52 Diving Deep into NASCAR with a Baseball Twist
57:46 Wrapping Up with Player and Pitcher of the Week

The Schoch Factor is brought to you by Soldier Sports.
Follow Stephen on Twitter: @BigDonkey47
Follow Jake and Jordan on Twitter: @CespedesBBQ
Follow the podcast on Twitter: @SchochFactorPod
Subscribe to The Schoch Factor on Apple | Spotify

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Baseball

An ode to PSU’s Hot Dog Night + hat tips to standout players • D1Baseball

Published

7 hours ago

April 16, 2024

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Columns
Stephen Schoch – April 16, 2024

Hey fans, we are halfway through the college baseball schedule and it’s now officially my favorite time of the season. Now, some people will say it’s the midseason, however things are anything but mid. I love the midseason because it’s the point in which we now have a good idea of which teams are playing solid baseball and what teams to look out for as we head towards the postseason. This is a real make or break time for a lot of teams and in the next couple of weeks we’re going to learn a lot about all these teams. Kendall made the mistake of giving me access to post on the website now, which means each week I will be highlighting some of my favorite highlights and oddities from the week in college baseball.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s get into it:

• To lead things off, we are going to start with the No. 1 team in the nation. It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that the team named the Aggies are phenomenal at taking care of work at the yard. Every now and then comes an innovator, someone who can take something that is already good, and find a way to optimize it even better. In terms of the Aggies, we saw this happen in the early 1900’s when the tractor was invented and crops could be focused more so on sales and production rather than feeding livestock to fuel the plows, such as horses, mules, and even donkeys. Well, this season, similar optimization has been happening for the Aggies in the form of “Smart and Good at Baseball”. Insert Penn transfer Jackson Appel. In their midweek game against UTSA, Appel went 3-4 with 3 home runs, the last of which was a walk-off. If the last was not a walk-off the rumor has been swirling around that Jackson was never even going to go home, he was just going to stay at the yard and keep mashing bombs for all eternity.

• Staying the course with “Smart and Good at Baseball ” guys we need to shine a light on Penn baseball’s Wyatt Henseler, who hit his 47th career home run this weekend, while driving in his 165th and 166th career RBI’s. Playing baseball in the Ivy League is cool for several reasons, but one of the coolest is the history of it, as these are the schools that come top of mind when thinking about premier education, and the history of higher education in general. The Ivy League was first penned in 1935 with the official formation of the conference taking place in 1954. All that is to say in all the years since then, not a single soul has driven in more RBIs than Wyatt Henseler. Not Lou Gehrig when he was at Columbia, not George H.W. Bush at Yale, so shout out to Wyatt Henseler for earning those bragging rights. Interestingly, Henesler will play ball at Texas A&M next spring.

• Another guy who has been electric all season long is Wake Forest’s Chase Burns. Over the weekend, he became the first pitcher in Division I baseball to reach the 100-strikeout mark as he has settled at 105 punch outs in just 57 innings pitched. Chase is one of the nicest players I have gotten to meet this season, just a genuinely kind dude, which makes it that much more fun to watch him get on the mound and turn into a completely different person. When Chase is on the mound, he looks like he would take the last slice of pizza without asking if anyone wanted to go “splitzies” to put it lightly. To put it literally, he is out there throwing baseballs at speeds I used to think were impossible, while going ballistic. It is just a very funny juxtaposition where off the field he is a guy who is posting cute and funny animals on his Instagram to make people happy, then on it, well you just must watch for yourself.

• I want to start with a disclaimer that I don’t typically report on injuries and things of that nature unless it’s a normal/fluke thing that won’t really harm anyone’s draft stock. Either way, Billy Amick missed some time the past couple of weeks because his appendix decided to burst, or need to be removed, or whatever it is that doctors do with those bad boys. I digress. Billy made his way back into the lineup this weekend and wasted no time at all picking up exactly where he left off, belting the first pitch he’s seen post appendectomy deep out of Lindsey Nelson. Not sure how HIPPA works or anything of that nature, but I really think there’s a strong NIL opportunity for whoever performed this removal surgery. I mean, I would happily trade my appendix to hit home runs with my friends any day of the week.

• The final moment I want to talk about from this week in college baseball comes from all the way across the nation at Oregon State where in its midweek against Portland, Travis Bazzana belted his 18th home run of the season, which was also the 35th of his career. This broke the record that was previously shared by teammates from the 2000’s Beavers team, Joe Gerber and Andy Jarvis, who both belted 34 each. Travis is a ball player that I have just so much respect for. When I was 18 years old, I left my hometown and moved two states away to play baseball, had horrible stats, and nearly went crazy. Travis is over here playing baseball one whole ocean away from his hometown of Sydney, Australia. Getting recruited to play college ball is definitely tough, but for Travis, he essentially had a 2-week window to get recruited while on a trip to America, and not only did he accomplish that, he got recruited by his dream school. He has an awesome story and if you want to hear all about it you can listen to our episode of the Schoch Factor Podcast where we are joined by the wonder from down under linked below. At the risk of some spoilers, I will say he did confirm for me that the Bloomin’ Onion is a fabricated culinary innovation and not in fact a naturally occurring vegetable in Australia as some people would believe. Not me, but I am sure some people would believe it.

• EXTRA INNINGS

This is not so much a moment, but more of a “this is what college baseball is all about” situation. Penn State Baseball does Dollar Dog Night Promotions for a large majority of its midweek games. This week, they won 12-2 over the FDU Knights, which cut the game short to only be eight innings. Eight innings in which they absolutely shattered records, in the year 2024, with the pitch clock in effect, fans consumed a whopping 6,151 hot dogs. Read that number again and think about how many hot dogs you have ever seen in your life, that probably isn’t even 6,151. Now imagine a small swimming pool full of them. That’s what I imagine 6,151 hot dogs to look like and to be honest, someone pass me my flippers because I want to dive right in. That means they were consuming at a DPI (dogs per inning) of roughly 769!!! To the concessions staff, I salute you, to the fans, I salute you, to the Penn State baseball marketing team, I salute you, and let’s work to find a way to mix in a dollar Pepto Bismol night as well.

More hot dog data if you’re into that kind of thing:

On google I found an article that said 75 hot dogs is about 16 pounds, or the weight of a household vacuum (do NOT ask me why this was the 16-pound object he chose to compare to, but great comp IMO) not sure the Dog to Dyson quotient, but we’ll work with it. So, 1 hotdog is getting us 2.1% of a vacuum (transitive property of hot dogs) -> 6,151 * 0.021= roughly 129 vacuums worth of hot dogs or 2,064 pounds of hot dogs.

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