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The College World Series is here
Saturday’s Say Hey, Baseball includes the start of the College World Series, a new career path for Tim Tebow, and Max Scherzer’s dominance.
Photo by Peter Aiken/Getty Images
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It’s a big weekend in the baseball world, with the most important event on the NCAA baseball schedule getting underway. Teams from around the country have been participating in regionals and super regionals for a couple of weeks, but now the college baseball tournament is down to eight teams and it’s officially time to start the College World Series in Omaha.
Participating this year will be: Oregon State, LSU, Florida State, Cal State Fullerton, Florida, TCU, Louisville, and Texas A&M. Six of those eight squads are among the original top eight nationally ranked teams, with Florida State, Cal State Fullerton, and Texas A&M as the unranked teams.
The format isn’t that of your typical college tournament, particularly the one you are used to watching in March. Rather than going with a simple bracket in which the loser of each game goes home, the College World Series uses double-elimination. Specifically, the field is split into two four-team groups that play in mini double-elimination tournaments. One team will emerge from each group, and the two winners will play in a best-of-three series for the championship. Last season, Coastal Carolina defeated Arizona for the title.
For MLB fans, the most exciting part of that — outside of the competitive baseball, of course — will be watching some future major leaguers. There are many high-profile players competing in Omaha over the next couple of weeks who were just drafted by major league organizations. Brandon McKay, Alex Faedo, Alex Lange, and Drew Rasmussen are the first-rounders to watch. All eight teams will be participating over the weekend, with the first game taking place at 3 p.m. ET on Saturday. Enjoy the action.
- Things aren’t really working out for Tim Tebow as an outfielder, so why not give it a shot as a knuckleballer?
- The Freeze is a sensation that has been sweeping the nation, but he was defeated on Friday night by a fairly significant margin.
- Max Scherzer just struck out 10 batters for the eighth time in 14 starts this season. I think he might have a spot in this league.
- The Yankees have been much better than anyone expected them to be this season. Oddly enough, they are actually playing worse than they should be.
- The Giants, meanwhile, have not been great. In fact, it might be time for them to move on from Brandon Belt.
- Some scary news out of Detroit, with Victor Martinez being hospitalized with an irregular heartbeat. Obviously, we wish the best to Martinez.
- It’s been a disappointing year for the Royals, and in particular, they’ve gotten a disappointing performance from their closer.
- We learned earlier this week that Tyler Thornburg will be shut down for the season before throwing a pitch for the Red Sox. Now we look back at the trade from the Brewers’ point of view.
- The Phillies haven’t taken the step forward in their rebuild that they were hoping for in 2017. There are a few issues here, but is one that they are too slow to call up prospects?
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