Decided to get the ole motion camera out and tell the tale about one of my favorite stories from the dark ages of college baseball: Maine’s home weekends where they’d bring a team in from far flung locales and treat them to the best weekend of the season. This is the story from the last of those great, lost weekends in the Northeast back in 1993.

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A FEW QUICK HITS

Lots has happened in the last few weeks and I haven’t gotten around to commenting on it yet, so here’s a quick take on some of them.

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NCAA CHANGES RPI

The usually tepid, uneventful off-season has pulled a significant 180 this year with the NCAA Selection Committee’s announcement that the RPI formula that it uses “as a tool” to select the Field of 64 and the No. 1 seeds will go through some changes beginning in the year 2013. As you have probably read by now, the biggest change is that road wins will now carry a weight of 1.3, instead of the previous 1.0 and home wins will count as 0.7 instead of 1.0. There will also no longer be any bonus points for beating a top 75 team and no ouchie points for losing to a bottom 75 team.

I’ve never understood why college basketball had a reward system for road wins (they give it a surprisingly high 1.4 for road win/0.6 for home win weight factor) and baseball never did. In 2002, after the Field of 64 was announced, I called into the phone-in press conference and asked then-Chair Wally Groff if “anything was being done to encourage teams to play more road games?”

Groff, then the Texas A&M A.D. said in his monotoned-southern accent, “That’s what we’re doing here today.” (WTF?)

Two years later, during the same post-announcement media call, I asked then-Chair Charlie Carr, “Is baseball ever going to be like college basketball where they give bonus points for road wins, especially with so many teams having to play on the road early in the season?”

The Florida State A.D. answered with, “We’re looking into that.”

Guess it finally took seven years of “looking.” Neither chairman was in the mood to go into much discussion about it, obviously. Which, considering something wasn’t finally done until 2011, tells me that the truthful answer from both guys should’ve been, “Hell no. We won’t even consider it.”

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THE EFFECT ON 2011.

The NCAA released a very interesting 1-to-300 ranking on how the new rules would’ve affected the 2011 RPI, had it been implemented this season. Click here to view the chart. The first thing that jumped off the page to me?… St. John’s would’ve received a 19-place bump up to No. 34, thus negating all that hoo-hah over getting an at-large bid.

The one thing I was struck by was there was no real rhyme or reason to the advantages. Sure, a good bit of the southern mid-majors were hurt by it and sure, some of the Northern schools got a good bump up. But there were also examples of just the opposite.

For example, Elon would’ve gained six spots. Louisiana Tech would’ve gained eight spots. And Troy would’ve gained five spots.

I was really interested to see what some of the geographically isolated programs would’ve gained or lost as well. I was shocked to see that New Mexico (dropped five spots), New Mexico State (dropped 13 spots) and Washington State (dropped 15 spots) would’ve still been hit hard. And Hawaii, goodness, the Rainbows would’ve free-fallen 16 slots… OUT of at-large consideration. (Then again, it’s Hawaii, a team that MUST play a lot of home games, so I digress). On the positive side of the geographically challenged, Gonzaga (+19), Minnesota (+18) and Utah (+26) will get some additional credit.

I think I was most shocked that East Tennessee State would have only been dropped three places in the RPI with the new factors. I recall earlier in the season Aaron Fitt and I were wondering out loud how the hell the Bucs were ranked in the Top 10 of the RPI, even though it was after only four or five weeks. So this is a perfect example of how this won’t fix the over-arching problem of the RPI being a pile of shit. They just finally put a little better shine on it.

For a great analysis of who got what, check out Fitt’s column he wrote after the figures came out. It’s good stuff man.

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BOYD WEIGHS IN.

But hold your horses people. Even though it’s good to see that road wins will give a team a ratings boost and there’s always the possibility that it might just encourage teams to hit the road from time to time, the guru of the RPI, Mr. Boyd Nation, warns that it doesn’t really fix the problem.

He wrote me, “There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea — it doesn’t address the underlying problems with the RPI, but done right it would be slightly more accurate.”

But the mathematical whiz does give out this warning, “As for helping the Northern teams, trying to do that from the RPI end is exactly backwards. [They should] fix the systemic problems that disadvantage the North and then use the RPI to measure whether what you’ve done has worked; don’t pretend that changing the measurements actually improved the Northern teams.”

Boyd says, “The RPI isn’t salvageable by any one change, unless that one change is to take one of the systems that actually works and re-label it as the RPI.”

Gotta love the dude.

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ANOTHER BOON TO NORTHERN SCHOOLS.

Okay, this may qualify as a conspiracy theory in some ways, but I’m noticing a disturbing trend in college baseball.

When the NCAA tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1999, Richard Rockwell, the coach for LeMoyne College, was the chairman on the NCAA Selection Committee. In the two years that he was chair, I thought the committee did a good job of spreading the game. They had Regionals in locations like Montclair, New Jersey, Minneapolis, South Bend, Columbus and Wichita. Hell, I remember in 2000 thinking that Creighton and Penn State both got a real gift by getting at-large bids despite having an RPI in the upper 40s (if memory serves me well). So I thought Northern schools got some benefit of the doubt and a few bones thrown their way early on. And even a year into A&M’s Wally Groff took over, things still seemed like a boon to the North.

Then, when Charlie Carr took over the chairman spot in 2003, I thought things really changed. It didn’t seem like any of the breaks went the North’s (or the West’s) way. Very few Northern regionals. Very few borderline at-large picks accompanied the selections and I started to hear more and more northern and west coast coaches start to sound off about it.

That seemed to go through Mississippi State A.D. Larry Templeman’s tenure as the chairman from 2006 to 2008 as well.

Now, magically, in Tim Weiser’s second and third year of being chairman we start to see some real wholesale changes – be them good or bad, depending on where your feet stand in these United States. I’m not suggesting a conspiracy here, but the timing of some of these events makes you wonder how much “control” the chairman position has.

Feel free to take off your tin foil hats now.

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ARIZONA SCHOOLS GOING BIG TIME?

In the past week, both Arizona and Arizona State have handed out press releases that announce they are looking into possibly moving their “home” stadium locations to off-campus MLB training camp stadiums.

Arizona may be moving from Sancet Field to legendary Hi- Corbett Field, while ASU has proposed a move from Packard Stadium to a new stadium it would share with the Chicago Cubs that would be three miles down Rio Salado Blvd. and will open in 2014.

Hi Corbett Field, Tucson. Old-school stadium has its charms, though it could use more shaded area

While I have enjoyed both on-campus stadiums in recent years, I have to say that the moves could make a lot of sense. It’s not like there are a lot of students that come to games at either location. The majority of the crowds for these games are older baseball fans and retirees. These fans would appreciate sitting through games with nicer facilities and more fan-friendly features.

Hi Corbett was the former home to the Colorado Rockies spring training camp, but they have since moved to Scottsdale, leaving Tucson with no spring training teams any longer. ASU’s new stadium would only have to compete with pro spring training games in the month of March, so February, April, May and even June if they qualify to host Regionals, would see the Devils as the only game in town. (Yes, I realize the Diamondbacks play in downtown Phoenix, but I’m talking *affordable* games to go to here).

Artist rendering of the stadium that ASU could be sharing with the Chicago Cubs in Mesa in 2014.

The other BIG draw? Both stadiums would be able to provide beer sales and would enable both programs to keep the money made from concessions. In this day and age of facility wars, this would be a win-win for both programs.

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THE FALL GUYS.

The last few years I’ve enjoyed going to see teams like Long Beach State, San Diego and Fullerton all playing each other in some fall scrimmages. But by doing so these teams are of course sacrificing a couple of games in the spring, by rule of the NCAA. That’s one rule I wish they’d change. Let teams play a handful of fall scrimmages and NOT have it count against their 56-game schedule the following spring. Mainly because it gives junkies like me that are jonesing for more college baseball during the off-season a chance to get my fix.

The other day I saw where Vanderbilt is going to travel to Texas again this October for a few games between the two. That is, of course, a 12 on the 1-10 awesome scale and the best of the fall schedules I’ve seen. Hopefully more will emerge in the weeks ahead.

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TWO MOST-INTERESTING COACHING HIRES… SO FAR.

First off, and this is one I touched on while covering the MVP Tournament in Atlanta a few weeks ago where a lot of HBCU coaches were in attendance, Mervyl Melendez going from his uber-successful stint at Bethune-Cookman to the moribund program that is Alabama State. The Hornets finished the 2011 season at 9-28 and No. 295 in the RPI, five spots out of the basement of Division I.

New Alabama State head coach Mervyl Melendez was a man who wore many helmets at BCU

How about THAT for a hiring? Coach Melendez must be looking for new, impossible challenges. And kudos to the Hornets’ administration for opening up the check book and showing that maybe they want to go ahead and have a program that matters. Very cool. One thing that struck me about coach Melendez when I did the Q&A with him during the Urban Invitational back in March is that he doesn’t except excuses. If his team has to practice in an asphalt parking lot, so be it.

I have a feeling the Hornets will be challenging for a SWAC title in a matter of a year or two.

The other “bingo!” hiring in the past few weeks was South Dakota State going after – and landing – Dave Schrage. In his 23 years as a head man, this is a guy that has become known for being a program re-builder. No two ways about it. The best example for Coach Schrage was when he took over Northern Illinois after the Huskies had gone 4-51 in 1999. Within two seasons he had UNI with a 28-27 record and was runner-up for National Coach of the Year.

He moved on to Evansville and eventually turned that program around, leading them to the title round of the Charlottesville Regional in 2006, while winning 43 games that season.

Now, Schrage’s last gig was a rather tepid tenure at Notre Dame where the program never could quite gain any traction, going just 119-104-1 in his four seasons. But one of the biggest factors to a slow start there, and the most tragic, happened to be the death of his wife just before his first season in South Bend.

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ONE LAST PARTING SHOT.

In case you were wondering, the background music for this week’s Baldcast was Jesse Malin’s “Burning On the Bowery”. Jesse is the former lead singer for the glamish-rock band D Generation, who had a big following, especially in the New York City area, back in the late 80s and 90s. I got the chance to see Jesse and his band, which goes by the name “the Saint Mark Social.” They played their unique brand of garage rock at The Key Club in Hollywood on Thursday night. Here’s the video for the song if you wanna check it out without my yapping over it.