The college baseball season begins this weekend in Houston with the annual Minute Maid College Classic at Minute Maid Park. The six team event, which includes Rice, Houston, Texas, Texas Tech, Ohio State, and Kansas State, runs through Sunday and is held in conjunction with the Astros’ Fan Funfest at the ballpark.
College baseball is big in Texas in general and Houston in particular. Rice is the defending NCAA National Champion and Texas won the championship the year before. Moreover, Houston has an outstanding program, and almost knocked out Rice last year and Texas the year before in the NCAA Regional Finals. Finally, both Rice and Houston have outstanding on-campus ballparks that make watching a game at either place a highly enjoyable experience.
Although not as popular as either big-time college football or basketball, a good case can be made that college baseball is a much better structured and a truer college sport than either football or basketball. Unlike professional football and basketball, professional baseball has a well-established minor league (i.e., apprentice) system. Consequently, high school players with professional baseball potential have a choice coming out of high school–either sign a professional contract and apprentice in the minor leagues or take lesser pay (i.e., the value of a full or partial college athletic scholarship) and play baseball in college for a few years. As a result, big-time college baseball programs are generally comprised of an attractive mix of players–a few players with professional potential who have opted to develop for a time in a fun college environment and the majority of players who are simply playing for a little scholarship money and the love of the game.
In contrast, high school players with professional football potential really do not have much of a choice. With no minor league football system in place, they must apprentice in college football–regardless of whether they have any interest in a college education–because few high schoolers are physically developed sufficiently to qualify for an NFL team. Professional basketball is somewhat different, primarily because the personnel requirements of the professional teams are signicantly less than football or baseball and thus, the professional teams can use a few of their roster spots to develop young phenom players who are not ready yet to play at the NBA level. Nevertheless, unless a high school basketball player with professional potential is a phenom, his only real alternative is to develop in college basketball, again regardless of whether the player really has any interest in a college education.
Accordingly, professional football and basketball have shifted much of the risk and cost of player development to big-time college football and baseball. As a result, those college sports are filled with players who really do not appreciate or belong in a university environment. So long as university presidents are willing to accept that risk from the pros, I do not expect any meaningful reform in college football or basketball to occur. However, if the university presidents want a model of how to reform those sports, they need to look no further than college baseball for an excellent example of how a college sport can thrive without being an apprentice league for professional sports.

The NY Times reports that single season home run champ Barry Bonds‘ personal trainer–Greg F. Anderson–was indicted today in San Francisco with three others for illegal distribution of steroids. The indictment is here.
Bonds is a magnificent player, clearly the best of his generation and one of the best baseball players of all-time. However, in the first 14 years of his career, Bonds hit 40 or more home runs three times, 40 (1993), 42 (1996) and 46 (1997). In the past four seasons in which he has gone from age 36 to 40, Bonds has hit 49, 73, 46, and 45. Moreover, his on-base average and slugging percentage–probably the two most important individual offensive statistics in baseball–have been significantly higher in Bonds’ past three seasons than they were in the previous 15. Finally, when Bonds broke into the big leagues in 1986 at the age of 22, he weighed a sleek 186 lbs. He now looks like a chiseled heavyweight of almost 230 lbs.
Uh, Barry, please pass some of those Wheaties over here.