2009 championship tomorrow
May
2009
A cooler day than yesterday but there is promise of sunshine and at least for today wind as the front that kept the area warm has swept through.
Jeff Sackmann has put together a simulation for the D-III Championship at http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/small-college-world-series-odds/
A fair ranking, although I would not make the list exactly the same, The biggest surprise is who ends up on top. Will this be the year that a Championship rookie takes home the Walnut and Bronze? This has happened in the past with Ramapo and George Fox, winners in their only appearance to date.
Tradition says. There are a long line of teams making their first trio going home 0-2. This is the past and we had Adrian doing quite well and Wheaton making a run, ending up just short.
There are records to be broken this year and the first in 2009 will be career appearances. Once they take the field, the Matt Pearson, Patrick Ohail, Tristan Phillips, and Wayde Kitchens will join past teammate, Kyle Redding, with their fourth appearance in the championship. This will bring the number of players with four appearances to 23.
Hope to see as many as I can. Don’t a stranger and introduce yourself to me at the ball park. I’ll be the one in my traditional hawai’ian shirt and yellow ball cap.
I am off to see a little practice and reacquaint myself with Fox Cities Stadium.
May 21st, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Kean as the 2nd least likely team to win it, eh? Um…I’ll just call that interesting.
51% chance for Salisbury? No way. None. Easy to say now, but even if they had made it, that would have been ludicrous.
The failure in the system is that Pythagorean percentage rewards ridiculous margins of victory, so Salisbury beating Gallaudet 30-0 actually matters to the ranking, for example.
Pythag has its uses and is particularly useful in balanced schedules, but against widely disparate scheduling IMO has almost none. Not to mention that in Division III, teams that get overloaded on the schedule sometimes have to give up on a game and throw off pitching just to get through and lose 21-4 when maybe they could have only lost 10-4. In a real game with real teams, who cares? But the computer cares.
I do think Shenandoah, if this were lined out, would be a value pick for a variety of reasons.