Baseball Regionals are Almost Here

Monday, we'll find out which three other teams have to come to Baton Rouge and try to get through a regional against the biggest, noisiest crowd in baseball.

I'm going into crotchety old geezer mode here, but I still prefer the days of 8 regionals, with six teams in each to the current 16 regionals with 4 teams each.

To get through a 6 team regional, you ended up having to play your 5th pitcher in four days against theirs, so the bats really mattered, and a team with a deep pitching staff got big rewards. And this made getting those mid-week pitcher ready during the season a lot more important. We didn't see those games where a new guy takes the mound every other inning.

(You say we didn't lose ANY of those midweek games? Your point.)

The College World Series has the games more spread out, so having a couple of killer starters gets rewarded. There's just nothing right now that rewards the really deep pitching staffs.

And right now, the Tigers have one of the deepest pitching staffs I can remember.