Early look at Gators' power production, how pitch clock has affected college baseball
Friday, March 11, 2011 | Men's Basketball, Men's Golf, Scott Carter
Two major changes went into effect this season in college baseball: an NCAA mandate that schools use new modified bats and the introduction of a pitch clock.
We'll start with the new bats, which must meet what the NCAA calls the Bat-Ball Coefficient of Restitution standard – whatever that means. To improve safety, the NCAA now requires the use of metal bats that perform more like wooden ones.
Besides the new bats reducing that “ping'' sound we are all so familiar with in the college game, most expected the number of home runs to drop, too.
Using the top-ranked Gators as an example, let's take a look.
Florida hit 83 home runs in 64 games a year ago, led by Austin Maddox's team-high 17 homers. Florida batted .297 and had a .475 slugging percentage, averaging 6.9 runs per game.
In 13 games this season, the Gators are batting .309 with a .454 slugging percentage, averaging 5.7 runs per game. As you can see, the batting average is slightly higher, the slugging percentage slightly lower, and run production down by 1.2 per game.
However, the biggest drop-off is in home-run production. Florida has hit nine thus far, including three in Wednesday's 8-1 win at USF. When projected over a 64-game season like a year ago, Florida would finish with 44 homers, which would be its fewest in a season since hitting 38 in 1990.
Having said all that, it's still early in the season and no game corrects statistical oddities over a course of a full season more than baseball. Still, Florida's home-run numbers are likely to decrease this season like about every other team's due to the new bats based on early returns.
Next up, the following is a story earlier this week from the Wall Street Journal regarding the pitch clock. Interesting numbers for sure:
One of the most widespread complaints from casual baseball fans centers around the game's often sleep-inducing pace. College baseball, though, may have just solved the problem.
Ten days into the 2011 college season, new rules designed to speed up play appear to be working—shaving more than 15 minutes off of the average game time. The new regulations, enacted last summer by the NCAA Baseball Rules Committee, limit time between innings and pitches.
Breaks between innings are capped at 90 seconds, extended to 108 seconds for televised games. Time between pitches may not exceed 20 seconds, except if runners are on base, when there is no limit. The first time a pitcher violates the rule, he is given a warning. For each subsequent violation, an automatic ball is called.
When the batting team is not ready after the allotted time, an automatic strike is called. (The SEC, which piloted the scheme during last year's conference tournament, uses a scoreboard clock, while other conferences use umpires' stopwatches).
Over the first several hundred games of the D-I season, about 76% of contests this year have been completed in three hours or less, compared to 57% during the same span last year. The improvement is more dramatic at the 2:30 threshold: One-third of games this season have been completed in that amount of time, compared to only 14% in 2010.
Pace of game is particularly important in college baseball, due to the frequency of doubleheaders and the Sunday evening curfews in many conferences. What's more, in tournament play, as many as four games per day are scheduled on a single field. With this problem potentially fixed, all that's left to do now is to convince Major League Baseball to adopt the same rules.
|
2010* |
2011 |
|
|
Games |
894 |
872 |
|
Average game length |
3:02 |
2:45 |
|
Games 3:00 or under |
57% |
76% |
|
Games 2:30 or under |
14% |
33% |
|
Games 2:00 or under |
1% |
4% |
Source: CollegeSplits.com *first 10 days of play
