NCAA: Baseball season starting later

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NCAA: Baseball season starting later

BEAUMONT - His team is almost three weeks into preseason practice, and the opener is a mere 10 days away.

Not surprisingly, Lamar baseball coach Jim Gilligan is fired up about the start of the season. As for the start of next season, well, he's less enthusiastic - and it has nothing to do with Lamar's incoming recruits or returning players for 2008.

Call it a delay-of-game infraction, courtesy of the NCAA.

Starting next year, no college baseball team will be allowed to practice before Feb. 1, and season openers will start on Feb. 22 across the country - an obvious move by the NCAA to help level out the competitive balance between teams from, say, Minnesota, and teams from Texas.

"To be honest with you, I think the cold-weather schools have really done a disservice to warm-weather schools, making them pack it up until later," Gilligan said. "I don't care how far they put (the start dates) back. We're still going to have better weather."

Officially, the starting date for every future season after 2007 is "the first Friday in February that is 13 weeks before the Sunday immediately before Memorial Day."

In simpler terms, next year's regular season will start Feb. 22 - a much later date than in the past.

In 2005, for instance, the first college baseball games were Jan. 21, when Cal Poly played at San Diego. Lamar has played nine games before Feb. 22 the last two years, and this season the Cardinals will have six games under their belt by then - all of them happening in the state of Texas.

Previously, teams had 22 weeks for games and practices in the fall and spring, and they could start practicing at any time.

Many warm-climate programs, including Lamar, begin practice the day their spring semester starts.

Not surprisingly, Midwestern and Northeastern schools are the biggest fans of the new rule; they have long claimed that warm-weather programs have held an advantage because they could start practicing outside in January. In places like Iowa and Pennsylvania, they're still digging out of the snow.

Gilligan? Not a fan.

Because the NCAA will not extend baseball season to compensate for the later Feb. 1 start date, teams will basically have to play their allotted 56 games over a 12-week period until the postseason starts in late May.

It creates a problem, Gilligan said, because teams will probably need to schedule two midweek games instead of one (typically, college programs play one game on a Monday or Tuesday, then play a three-game series on the weekends).

Because teams will pack their games together, Gilligan said, they'll probably have to carry more pitchers on their rosters, as not to overwork their staffs in a given week.

That's to say nothing of the extra classes they'll miss because of midweek travel.

"So you might have to start doing doubleheaders on Saturday or Sunday," Gilligan said. "We'll never have it the way we used to have it."

So why not extend the season farther into the summer? The NCAA didn't give an explanation, but it's probably a money-saving issue.

Schools usually cover athletes' costs of living for every day they're still in a season but not attending classes. In other words, LU and other schools feel obligated to feed and shelter their players after final exams, even though on-campus dorms and cafeterias are closed.

The NCAA begins picking up the tab when regionals begin.

Gilligan said he didn't expect the new rules to affect scheduling for Lamar, because it's still easier for cold-weather schools to start their season on the road in warm weather.

"It's always going to be better for them to come down here because - you have to think about this - January and February are bad, but even into March and April, the weather back east is pretty bad," Gilligan said. "(The) bottom line is, I just wish they would have left this alone."