D3baseball.com Daily Dose

With the 2010 season underway, I start a new series of Clearing the Bases. With just a few games in the books I want to address the two polls.

There are two polls that come out during the season one is what can be called the coaches and media polls. The coaches poll is run by the ABCA and Collegiate Baseball. Along with a preseason poll, the poll ranks the top 30 teams. The first poll of the season is released in late March and five more polls are issued every other week with a final poll at the end of the season. A panel of coaches votes on the pollThere The media poll is run by the NCBWA and D3baseball.com. Starting in the last week of February, through the Championship round, the Top 25 is issued weekly with a one week hiatus over D-III regional Playoff weekend. The Top 25 is voted on by a panel of 25 SIDs and media members from across the country.

The preseason polls for each come out at different times. The ABCA/CB poll comes out just before the new year and the Top 25 comes out in mid January. I cannot tell you about the how the preseason coaches poll is created but I know about the Top 25. It is as the statement about the poll above. We have a representative sample of SIDs and D3baseball contributors from every region. We target three ballots from SIDs and the media from each region. I do monitor the poll as the ballots arrive and once the number of ballots reaches about half of the 25, the poll changes little after each additional ballot.

Both polls do as well as a predictor of the future. Last season, both polls had St. Thomas in the bottom half of their respective poll. If you look at the number of teams that remained in the poll at the end of the year, the numbers are comparable, no matter which final poll you use for comparison.

The one thing to remember in the end is that none of these polls are used to determine who plays for the Championship. The path to that top ranking lies entirely on what happens on the field.