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1) Let's start with Mizzou softball because that's the best thing going for the Tigers right now. Missouri swept Mississippi State over the weekend, which should have been expected since the Bulldogs came into the series without a single win in the SEC. So it's hardly Mizzou's biggest win of the season, but truth be told, you can be pretty good just by beating bad teams all season. The problems start when you start losing games you shouldn't. Missouri avoided that. The Tigers currently sit fourth in the SEC standings at 10-5. They have three series remaining and none are easy. They'll face 1st place Arkansas, 2nd place Florida and Tennessee, which is 7th in the SEC but ranked 16th in the country. The combined overall record of those three teams? 100-18. If Missouri can find a way to be 4-5 in those three series, it's probably a pretty strong finish and could put the Tigers in position to be a national seed in the NCAA Tournament.
2) Meanwhile, the weekend went the opposite direction for Missouri baseball. The Tigers went into the weekend series at Florida in last place in the SEC East, but with a chance to make up ground in the final few weekends. Mizzou was only two games back of the Gators for fourth place. But Florida took the three games by a combined seven runs and Missouri is in last in the East by three full games with no real path out of the cellar. There are still five SEC series to go, but Mizzou has won just one conference series this season and has now lost six straight games. The last place team in each division is left out of the SEC Tournament. At this point, it will be a bit of a surprise if that's not Missouri. The two teams directly ahead of the Tigers are Kentucky, which already beat Mizzou in a series, and Georgia, who Mizzou hosts this weekend. Missouri would need a sweep of that series just to get into a tie with the Bulldogs.
3) So you all know Missouri isn't having a good baseball season. But the most common question we get about baseball is WHY is it such a struggle for the Tigers? When Mizzou moved to the SEC, everyone focused on how tough the move would be for football. That's certainly understandable. But I said at the time if Mizzou football was jumping into the deep end of the pool, Mizzou baseball was stepping off a cliff. Kentucky, Mizzou and Alabama are the only SEC teams not to have been to the College World Series since 2000 (Bama last went in 1999, Mizzou in 1964 and Kentucky never).
There are a multitude of reasons (recruiting base, geography, weather, history, etc) it's tough for Missouri in this league. But the main reason is very simple: Everyone else cares more.
This isn't an insult to the fans. Part of it is fans, sure, but I'm not trying to take shots at anyone. College baseball simply isn't a thing that is important at Mizzou.
Football obviously runs the show at every SEC school. But the key is, what's second? I'd argue at at least half the schools in the conference, it's baseball. Here are the schools I think care more about baseball than men's hoops: South Carolina, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Texas A&M, LSU, Georgia, Vanderbilt. I think it's debatable at Florida, Auburn and maybe even Alabama. You look around the league and there are a lot of media corps covering every game, tweeting updates every inning. That's the expectation at most of the schools in the SEC. It just isn't and never really has been here.
I went back and looked at the 2007 Super Regional against Louisville. Missouri's three-game attendance for that series was 9459. That included two sellouts of 3630 and then a game three crowd of 2199 because it was played on a weekday afternoon if memory serves. So that was pretty good. It was as packed as Taylor Stadium has ever been. Ole Miss vs Mississippi State drew 10,500 fans on Sunday. For a regular season game in Starkville. I'm not blaming the fans. I'm not saying if more people showed up it would make the program better. But it's an illustration that it's just not a thing that's important to Mizzou fans. Baseball has a pocket of fans. Those that care really care. It's just not all that many, especially when you compare it to other teams in the league.
The buy in from the administration has never really been there either (getting the field turfed, which was something Steve Bieser wanted when he took the job, was a multi-year project, even though it could have been covered by pretty much any of the seven-figure checks that have come in for the new football facility this year alone). And I'm not blaming the administration either. Why spend more money and resources on something that your fans have told you they largely don't care that much about?
It's a tough deal. You can't win without spending money, but it doesn't make much sense to spend money when you aren't winning and probably aren't going to win. For now, if you can avoid negative headlines, be somewhat competitive and make the NCAA Tournament once every few years, that's probably good enough for Mizzou baseball. Whether that's good enough for each individual person is up to them, but it's pretty much been shown the realistic expectations aren't much higher than that for the program.
3A) Speaking of sports there's no reason to dump a bunch of money into, soccer coach Bryan Blitz announced his retirement yesterday. I really don't have any thoughts on that other than coaching for 25 years and beating Kansas in your final game is a decent way to go out.
4) As far as other baseball, I know Major League Baseball is playing, I just can't watch any of it. I mean, don't get me wrong, I could. If I wanted to, there are ways. But I'm not interested in paying $110 to watch the Royals. Because of the issue with the regional sports networks and streaming services, I have no free way to watch them other than the once every few weeks they might be on ESPN. I know I'm hardly alone in this situation. There are a ton of Royals and Cardinals fans who haven't been able to watch their team play. I can get the games on the radio if I really want to (although that means I have to spend at least an hour listening to Steve Physioc talk and I'd rather stab myself in both ears with sharp objects at the same time), but I haven't watched a single pitch and we're about 10% of the way through the season. Is that a me issue? Yeah. But it's also an MLB issue. To not be able to get your games on streaming platforms in the Year of Our Lord 2021 tells me you just aren't trying very hard. But that's not new for baseball. The truth is, the sport has very few die hard fans under the age of about 40. Younger people like football, basketball, even MMA more. There's more action in those. Watching baseball bores a lot of people. And now MLB isn't even trying to engage more fans. The sport falls a little further behind everything else every year. I barely watched last year because I didn't care about a 60 game season. It appears I won't watch much this year. How much easier will it be not to watch next year when I've gone two years mostly not watching anyway?
Again, I know there are ways to watch. And I know some will say "if you aren't willing to spend 75 cents a game, you don't care that much anyway." And that's probably true. But there are thousands like me. Teams and leagues don't survive and thrive on the die hards. Those people are always going to be involved and find a way. They survive and thrive on the casual fan, by doing something to draw more and more of those people in. While other leagues are finding ways to do it, MLB operates almost as if they don't even want the casual fans. More and more, the wish is being granted.
5) Eli Drinkwitz got back on the commitment horse last week, adding Lebanon offensive lineman Tristan Wilson. That had been long expected, but nothing's official till it's official and Wilson is now official. That gives the Tigers two in-state offensive lineman, an area where they desperately need to hit big this year after getting just a couple last season. Wilson is the seventh commitment in the 2022 class. Five of them are from Missouri and one just across the Kansas border. The local momentum is still strong as Drinkwitz enters his second season. He has capitalized on the bump a new coach should get. This is the most buzz Missouri football has had around the state in quite some time. We've long talked about how Missouri's biggest hurdle in recruiting the state is that in-state kids just don't see going to Mizzou as "cool." I talked to someone this week who specifically told me "We've got to make coming to Mizzou cool around the state." They understand the battle. The early stages of it have been impressive. Obviously it has to turn into wins and sustained progress, but for a new staff without any real ties to the state, it's been impressive to see the way they've attacked recruiting a state that has spent a whole lot of years looking for any reason it can find not to buy in.
