November 23, 2009
Order Now The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2010 is now in development and will ship in mid November! This year's book will feature articles by THT's staff as well as Bill James, Tom Tango and Craig Wright. If you use this link to purchase the Annual, you will be in the first group to receive it and you'll be supporting THT. Most Recent Comments
Introducing Visual Baseball (1)
HR/FB Park Factors (7) Why Baseball Needs a Visual Facelift (5) Building a Retrosheet database, the short form (4) Is peak at age 29? (7) 
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Thursday, August 27, 2009A few clandestine notes on collegiate summer baseballPosted by Carson CistulliThe bad thing about being on a honeymoon in small town New England is that a) it's rather hard to find a dependable internet connection, let alone sit down and watch an entire game with a starting time of 7 pm PDT and b) in the event that you do find yourself, miraculously, in the warm arms of said game, your new wife threatens to, and this is verbatim, "Hurt you... physically." The good thing about the whole honeymoon/New England sitch, is that it allows the Baseballing Enthusiast to consider other baseball-related matters which he might've never considered otherwise. In this case, the matter in question is that phenomenon known as collegiate summer baseball. Having been on the Cape for the final game of that league's playoffs, and having found Jim Collins's book The Last Best League in a bookstore in my hometown of Concord, NH, and having then, finally, come across a schedule for the North Adams Steeplecats of the New England Collegiate Baseball League (NECBL) here, in the office of my moderately priced motel, I asked the following, Seinfeld-like question: "What's the deal with collegiate summer baseball?" Of course, I haven't asked it too hard, lest my new wife launch a surprise attack. Even so, I've spent some of my very precious internet time learning about the world of summer ball and thought these THT Live might be an appropriate place to share them. The first answer to the question is one that surprised me a little bit—namely, that there appear to be a ton of collegiate summer leagues out there, close to 40 active ones. Of those, eight (including the Cape Cod league) are part of what's known as the National Alliance of College Summer Baseball (NACSB). Another 15 are part of the National Baseball Congress (NBC). Beyond that, there are a number of unaffiliated leagues. These umbrella organizations appear to be dedicated primarily to creating norms among the leagues and fostering cooperation, both between teams/leagues and with the NCAA. PG Crosschecker, a division of Perfect Game, provides rankings of summer teams across a number of different leagues. The top five were (with league): 1. Forest City (N.C.) Owls, Coastal Plain 2. Bourne Braves, Cape Cod 3. Newport (R.I.) Gulls, New England 4. Rochester (MN) Honkers, Northwoods 5. El Dorado (KS) Broncos, Jayhawk You can find the rest of the rankings here. I wasn't able to find a list of top prospects either within each respective league, or—perhaps ideally—across all summer leagues. In an email to Yours Truly, Baseball America's college expert Aaron Fitt, said that they'll be posting league-specific prospect lists of 18 different summer leagues starting today (Thursday) and continuing through the beginning of next week. Such information, I'm guessing, will be found here (although a subscription is probably necessary). PG Crosschecker is currently doing a similar thing, although their lists also require a subscription of some kind. Certain league-dedicated websites/blogs, such as Greg Schimmel's Cape Cod League Blog, do provide prospect lists. College Summer Ball provides updates across all leagues. I'll post next week, after BA has finished their lists, to share any interesting findings from them. Carson Cistulli contributes to FanGraphs and RotoSynthesis and teaches writing in Portland, Ore. Feel free to email him. Comments
Brian Cartwright said...
As I’ve written about before, the All-American Amateur Baseball Association (AAABA) is a group of 24 leagues, age 20 and under, primarily in the north east. After regional playoffs, the final 16 teams compete in a double elimination tournament every August in Johnstown, Pa. The leagues vary in quality, and some of the better teams compete in other leagues. One of the best overall member leagues is the Clark Griffith League in metro DC, which has two or three teams that also compete in the Cal Ripken Sr league in Maryland. Posted 08/27 at 06:44 PM
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You didn’t ask “What is a Steeplecat?”?