In a day of equality and fairness, why is it that a sport as old as college baseball falls so far down the athletic pecking order of priority? (Press Pros Feature Photos)
With all-time highs in readership, the question we hear increasingly is…why does Press Pros spend so much time and resource on college baseball?
Scottsdale, AZ – Among the first responses about the opening weekend of the NCAA baseball season, I was not surprised to read, “You know, there’s a lot of basketball to cover back in Ohio.”
And, “Wouldn’t it be better to write about it when it’s baseball season. I don’t get it. Why?”
But, as the Ohio State Buckeyes launch their 143rd season of varsity baseball season this weekend…except for this website and the University’s sports information staffer for baseball, Breanna Jacobs, no one is here to cover the opening series with Boston College, Brigham Young, and USC…yes, that USC!
Which strikes me odd, because baseball was the original Ohio State sport, first played in 1881, and now, of course, the oldest.
So in the day of equality explain to me why that is, given the biggest university in Ohio, the oldest sport on campus; and when distinguished alumni like Nick Swisher writes a check for a million to support baseball no one questions. They just cash it!
If we thought of it in the same terms as we do about golf at St. Andrews it would be celebrated. But sadly, for the sake of college baseball and the athletes who dream of a future in baseball, no one in Columbus, outside the OSU sports information department, knows they’re here. Celebration…is reserved for football!
It’s true, there are those who question why we don’t spend the effort in a more timely manner, dedicating the manpower to early-round tournament basketball and spring football, and the current revolving door of coaches and transfers. In Columbus it’s always football mania on tap. Draw your third grader a cold one!
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But this is our 14th year at Press Pros, our 11th covering Buckeyes baseball, and it’s a question we’ve heard from day one. “Why do you guys spend so much resource covering Ohio State baseball?
It used to come from our local market in west-central Ohio.
But recently, as our profile grows in the Columbus market, we hear from those within a nine iron of campus. “What are you guys doing?”
The obvious answer, I guess…is that if we didn’t, who would? It’s been years since the local paper provided regular coverage of any Big Ten sport outside of football and basketball.
And the only time that Columbus television shows up is when someone gets fired, or hired – a slow news day.
It’s an issue as old as my own relationship with Ohio State baseball, as a player in the 70s, when the Dispatch, the Citizen-Journal and local television stayed away then, too. Understand, of course, that players like Dave Winfield and Paul Molitor, future hall of famers, were playing at Trautman Field every spring, but no one ever thought it was a story worthy of writing. It’s still that way.
From a personal standpoint, there’s two particular reasons for writing college baseball.
One, in a day and culture focused on equality and inclusion, I would think that the NCAA would focus more on profiling all of its athletes, if only in proportionate manner. Surely, a baseball player’s dream of getting to the major leagues is just as relevant as the football player whose goal is the NFL!
But for some reason former Buckeyes Ryan Feltner (Colorado Rockies) and Dominic Canzone’s (Seattle Mariners) recent ascension to the big leagues is not as big as story as how many Buckeyes there are in the NFL.
Of course, the reality is that college sports like baseball, softball, and lacrosse do not make money. Football does, so much in fact that universities rely on it to pay the bill for nearly every other sport on campus. Of course, if college baseball was played in the summer (warm weather), and marketed with a television package like ESPN has for the NCAA tournament…it’s very likely that over the course of a 60-game schedule it could attract enough fan interest to actually pay its own way. Rick Heller, the coach at Iowa, is one who firmly believes it’s possible – doable – and can go into great detail explaining why. He’s highly believable.
Two, we write Ohio State baseball, in part, as an incentive…to help boost lagging community baseball interest across the state, particularly in the rural parts of Ohio. The contemporary phenomenon called ‘travel baseball’, or ‘select baseball’, has had a devastating impact on many of the traditional opportunities for adolescents to play in their home communities, as they once did.
Towns that once had a league with a dozen privately-sponsored Little League teams in the summer now have none. Communities that once had Pony League, Babe Ruth, and American Legion baseball…they’re gone now, too. ACME baseball, in northwest Ohio for the past fifty years, is struggling to maintain some of its numbers. The best kids are plucked to travel and play on weekends, leaving the ‘tweeners’ and late-bloomers to lose interest, or quit.
The reason to promote college baseball is to communicate to those kids that there’s a reason to keep playing. For the late-developing athlete that grows into baseball by his junior or senior season, high school baseball is still relevant, and if they have at least a couple of the five tools of baseball…they might walk on at a given college and continue to play. It doesn’t have to be over just because you graduate!
Why do this?
Because if you love the sport four years of NCAA athletic participation really looks good on your professional resume’. And in my personal case, it’s opened more doors over the years than a college degree. Employers look at it and see a candidate that’s committed, competitive, that works well in a team environment, determined to win, and they see hiring advantage in those attributes.
And of course, for the ‘elite’ Ohio athlete who dreams of playing college baseball at the highest level, they can read about Ohio State as the Mount Rushmore of in-state opportunity. Publicity and profile – recognition by the media, compared to other schools that have none – is a wonderful incentive to stay at home and play.
Publisher/editor Sonny Fulks writes the Big Ten and Buckeyes baseball for Press Pros Magazine.com.
I’ve lived with this fact of baseball ambivilance now since my days a player…fifty four years ago, when then Columbus Citizen-Journal writer Kaye Kessler would occasionally come by the baseball field on that slow news day. It was a sign then, and in the decades since, of where college baseball, everywhere, falls within the pecking order.
If it’s about money, they move mountains for the sake of hundreds of millions in the fall. Surely, we could borrow from that example to do more in the spring.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s a choice, and baseball is a good story at Ohio State – in the Big Ten – and we do choose to write it.
And in 2023, more than 200,000 unique computers across Ohio (that’s the ‘Horseshoe’ full, twice) chose to read.
And counting……!
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