Why Nobody Cares About College Baseball

This article, in which Bill Simmons interviews Chuck Klosterman, is pretty good, but the part that really bothered me was when Klosterman asked why nobody cares about college baseball and Simmons gave him an utterly incorrect three-part answer: 1) there are too many games and it’s too hard to follow, 2) goofy “USFL-y” uniforms, and 3) aluminum bats. This is ludicrous. I’ll concede that there are too many games and that it’s too hard to follow, but the uniforms? Come on. If loud, ugly uniforms made something unpopular, the Seattle Seahawks wouldn’t exist, and neither would half the college basketball programs in the country. It’s not like college baseball teams are out there in all-orange hat-jersey-pants combinations like the Clemson football team.

There’s one big reason why college baseball isn’t as popular as the NCAA version of the other two major sports (football and basketball): the makeup of athletes in the pro game. In the NBA and NFL, the college game is the highly visible and direct pipeline to the pros; you can virtually guarantee that the marquee college players will become pro stars within a couple of years (or at least flame out spectacularly on a large scale, a la Gino Torretta or Ryan Leaf).

This could never be said of college baseball because of one big difference. Unlike the NFL or NBA, which are composed almost entirely of guys whose previous athletic experience was in American colleges, a big percentage of MLB is foreign-born now, and even in the pool of American players almost half of them come to the pros straight out of high school instead of college. With football and basketball, you can pretty much say that D-1 athletics are the premier place to play in the world for guys ages 18-22. In baseball the world’s best players are all over the place; some go straight from high school to the minors, some are in college, and some are in the Dominican Republic. It’ll never be the big show, even for kids that age, and THAT’s why college baseball isn’t popular, not the goddamn uniforms or bats.

In conclusion, there is something absurd about Bill “a large part of my livelihood comes from making fun of Tim McCarver and Beverly Hills, 90210” Simmons writing about the worthlessness of people who write endlessly about the media. And did he have to name his Q&A pieces "Curious Guy"? That sounds more homoerotically suggestive than the names of most gay clubs.