Thursday, June 26, 2008

You're the men now, 'Dogs.

I won't lie, I'm not a huge college baseball fan. I did, however, follow this year's College World Series, and I'm glad I did. It was a dandy.

Fresno State won the best-of-three series against the nation's #8 squad, Georgia. Fresno State was not ranked. If they didn't win their conference tournament in May, they wouldn't have even been considered for the regional tournament. In the field of 64, where there are 16 brackets of four teams, Fresno St. was the #4 seed in theirs. To put this into perspective, it's basically being somewhere from a 13-16 seed in the NCAA men's or women's basketball tournament. Only MARIST can pull this kind of stuff off!

Fresno St. didn't exactly run the table, but since it's double-elimination in each bracket, the Bulldogs were able to go 10-4 down the stretch, beating the likes of Long Beach State (top 30), San Diego (top 10), Arizona St. (#4), Rice (#6), North Carolina (#2), and then topping it off by taking two out of three from Georgia (#8).

For a team that lost 12 of its first 20, that's not too shabby.

The only thing I question is why Fresno St. 3b Tommy Mendonca was named Most Outstanding Player instead of OF Steve Detwiler. Medonca hit .281 for the CWS...I don't know his full stats, but he must have had a huge game in the 19-10 game two win over Georgia, because Detwiler went 4-for-4 with two homers and all six runs batted in for the Bulldogs in the decisive game.

Oh well.

I think this is the greatest Cinderella story of all time--only because of the improbability of it. Just like any sport, any team can beat any other team on any given day, but to take out so many of the nation's best in this span is nearly unfathomable. ESPN gives some choices--I still have trouble comparing college sports to professional sports, because the ability kind of evens out, especially when playoffs come for professional sports. It's difficult to get into, so I'll just take Fresno St.

2 comments:

Michael J. Clark said...

Love the reference to Sean Connery. Well played, my friend.

Travis Miller said...

what's a blog without sean connery?