Photo by: Andy Mead
Welcome to the Best Year in College Baseball History
February 17, 2021 | Baseball, #ForBoston Files
It's the deepest season ever, and BC is right in the thick of it.
Two points of view emerged from the 2020 baseball season.
One side saw Major League Baseball's championship series in late October as a massive success. The abbreviated season crowned a World Series champion on neutral ground, and the Los Angeles Dodgers fulfilled a preseason destiny from before the COVID-19 outbreak by hoisting the Commissioner's Trophy. The weird, winding road was replete with an extended postseason and a 60-game regular season sprint, but the postseason still celebrated the game.
The other side froze baseball in stasis. Sure, MLB crowned a champion, but the season ended for all intents and purposes when the global pandemic postponed everything in spring training. The Minor League Baseball season cancelled teams and stadiums across the country, and the college game failed to find a national champion for the first time since essentially World War II. The best parts of baseball at the community level weren't there, and the routine of a summer pastime vanished into the ether.
Both paths intertwined with the other, and one wouldn't happen without the other. The outcome is a fresh reality in 2021 and a new day, the impact of which is best exemplified by arguably the deepest and most talented season in NCAA baseball history.
"Our kids are just excited to be back on the baseball field," Boston College head coach Mike Gambino said. "Every day that they're on the baseball field playing together, is a good day. They love playing baseball, they love playing here (at BC), and they love the program."
Baseball's perfect storm timeline started in March when it basically shut down at every level. MLB shuttered its formal training sites in both Florida and Arizona, while college erased its season after approximately a dozen games. Everything went on hold in its own way, with TD Ameritrade Park in Omaha going completely dark and college failing to crown a national champion for the first time since the introduction of the College World Series in 1947.
The protracted impact to return to play impacted baseball more than any other professional league and introduced a void that seemingly grew at every turn. MLB plotted its road through a rebooted "Summer Camp" restart in July, and auxiliary training centers started popping up around home stadiums to replace the sprawling training facilities in both the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues. The 40-man roster expanded to 60 players in order to accommodate new COVID-based rules, a move that ultimately coincided with the cancellation of the minor league season.
The lack of MiLB games forced a stoppage on players' progression ladder and equally slammed an entryway for impending prospects. Franchises evaluated how to bring high school and draft-eligible players into the rookie ball and low-A programs and opted to lop the number of draft picks available. The 40-round MLB draft became five rounds and dropped more than 1,000 typical draft selections into oblivion.
That changed everything about the way baseball approached its draft, and both sign-ability and game-ready experience took center stage. Higher-risk high school players dropped off draft boards altogether in favor of more physically mature college players, and teams selected less than 50 high school prospects. The majority of draft choices came out of college, and roughly the same number of SEC, ACC and Pac-12 players went to teams as the entire high school network.
The remaining prospects were left to face a decision to either sign a contract as an undrafted free agent or play 2021 in college. MLB capped its signing bonus pool money for those players not selected as levels substantially lower than the early-round slot values, a secondary impact after the NCAA erased 2020's impact on eligibility. That college ball also erased its 35-player maximum roster size all but assured enough slots for everyone.
"We talked about one of the things about our team, and we made sure they understood that this team is a veteran team with really good depth," Gambino said, "but if you look around the league, every tam in ACC is both veteran and deep. Teams right now have five classes on every roster, plus transfers and graduate transfers. So we're not unique in the experience and depth that we have, even though we can be unique in other ways. That's going to make for a fun year to watch college baseball."
It created a collision course, and the 2021 college baseball season now starts with arguably its deepest talent pool in the history of the sport. More than a dozen players from the MLB.com Top 100 prospects are in the ACC alone, and every team returns a player likely drafted by a pro team in a normal draft year. In addition, players like Carson Montgomery (Florida State) and Kevin Parada (Georgia Tech) both went undrafted out of high school and entered the league for at least three years.
It's that umbrella under which BC takes the field on Friday. Last year's team featured prime high round picks in Jack Cunningham and Brian Dempsey, and Dante Baldelli looked for a redraft after going to the Philadelphia Phillies out of high school. All three received their eligibility reset and rejoined a roster stocked with almost a dozen eligible selections.
Sal Frelick, Mason Pelio and Cody Morissette are all on that aforementioned MLB.com Top 100, with Frelick inside the Top 25 and Pelio as the preseason ACC Pitcher of the Year. Emmett Sheehan is draft eligible and could receive a bump with a big year in the starting rotation, and Alex Stiegler transferred to BC after four years at Yale that included an NCAA Tournament berth in 2019.
Former Freshman All-American Chris Galland is back on the roster after sitting out the 2020 season, and transfer Sean Harrington led Babson to the Division III College World Series second round elimination round in 2019.
Every team is in that same boat, and it highlights the high degrees of difficulty of the upcoming season. NCAA.com projected as many as 10 ACC teams in the national tournament this year, including Boston College, its fifth place team in the Atlantic Division, but it noted how every team is good enough to qualify for selection. The three dozen league games feature one series against almost every team, and for BC, that means games against everyone except Georgia Tech.
Seven teams are in the Top 25, led by Louisville at No. 5, and four are slotted between No. 13 and No. 17. It's an ACC wall headed by NC State and wedged only by West Virginia between the Wolfpack and Georgia Tech, Virginia and Wake Forest, but Miami looms behind all of them at No. 21. The Hurricanes, led by No. 4 overall prospect Adrian Del Castillo, brought in the No. 1 overall draft class and are situated just ahead of Florida State, which added its highest-rated recruit ever in Montgomery.
BC garnered its highest-ever preseason recognition but needs to prove something this weekend against Charleston Southern. There are plenty of believers ready to buy in on the Eagles, but the Buccaneers are one of those schools in a good baseball league in the Big South. They finished last season under .500, but split a four-game series with Kansas before rattling off five straight wins at one point. Their separate sweep of Delaware State was akin to the way BC battered Fairfield before the season stopped.
It was a high water mark for CSU after it upset third-seeded Radford in the Big South Tournament in 2019 and after a regular season win over the Highlanders in 2018. That same year, the Buccaneers took a weekend series win on the road against the defending regular season champion Winthrop, and they've managed to post respectable numbers at home, finishing over .500 in 2016, 2017 and 2019.
It came one year after the Buccaneers upset third-seeded Radford in the Big South Tournament two years after a regular season win over the Highlanders. During that same 2018 season, CSU took a weekend series on the road from the then-defending regular season champion Winthrop Eagles. In 2016, 2017 and 2019, the Buccaneers finished over .500 at Nielsen Field.
It will lead directly into league play with back-to-back weekends against Duke and Wake Forest. The series are the Eagles' only consecutive league road series on the schedule and precede the home opener on March 10 against Holy Cross. A second game against the Crusaders bookends the weekend at Louisville in a year where local competition will intersperse the most home league games in program history.
"We are really excited to have a schedule and really excited to get into home games," Gambino said. "This is a program that four years ago, in a normal year, we didn't know where those early home games would be played. So you can imagine what it would be like having to function this year during COVID, and on Shea Field, we wouldn't be able to function. The seniors that played there remember that, so to be able to see them and the number of home games, with an extra ACC home series, is really cool. It's another aspect of the Pete Frates Center and the Harrington Athletics Village that makes us excited as coaches just as much as the players are excited to get back on the field."
BC kicks off its three-game series against Charleston Southern on Friday, February 19 at 3 p.m. Saturday's game is tentatively scheduled for 1:30 p.m. with Sunday set to kick off at 12 p.m. The games against Duke are currently to be announced next weekend with broadcast information not yet announced.
One side saw Major League Baseball's championship series in late October as a massive success. The abbreviated season crowned a World Series champion on neutral ground, and the Los Angeles Dodgers fulfilled a preseason destiny from before the COVID-19 outbreak by hoisting the Commissioner's Trophy. The weird, winding road was replete with an extended postseason and a 60-game regular season sprint, but the postseason still celebrated the game.
The other side froze baseball in stasis. Sure, MLB crowned a champion, but the season ended for all intents and purposes when the global pandemic postponed everything in spring training. The Minor League Baseball season cancelled teams and stadiums across the country, and the college game failed to find a national champion for the first time since essentially World War II. The best parts of baseball at the community level weren't there, and the routine of a summer pastime vanished into the ether.
Both paths intertwined with the other, and one wouldn't happen without the other. The outcome is a fresh reality in 2021 and a new day, the impact of which is best exemplified by arguably the deepest and most talented season in NCAA baseball history.
"Our kids are just excited to be back on the baseball field," Boston College head coach Mike Gambino said. "Every day that they're on the baseball field playing together, is a good day. They love playing baseball, they love playing here (at BC), and they love the program."
Baseball's perfect storm timeline started in March when it basically shut down at every level. MLB shuttered its formal training sites in both Florida and Arizona, while college erased its season after approximately a dozen games. Everything went on hold in its own way, with TD Ameritrade Park in Omaha going completely dark and college failing to crown a national champion for the first time since the introduction of the College World Series in 1947.
The protracted impact to return to play impacted baseball more than any other professional league and introduced a void that seemingly grew at every turn. MLB plotted its road through a rebooted "Summer Camp" restart in July, and auxiliary training centers started popping up around home stadiums to replace the sprawling training facilities in both the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues. The 40-man roster expanded to 60 players in order to accommodate new COVID-based rules, a move that ultimately coincided with the cancellation of the minor league season.
The lack of MiLB games forced a stoppage on players' progression ladder and equally slammed an entryway for impending prospects. Franchises evaluated how to bring high school and draft-eligible players into the rookie ball and low-A programs and opted to lop the number of draft picks available. The 40-round MLB draft became five rounds and dropped more than 1,000 typical draft selections into oblivion.
That changed everything about the way baseball approached its draft, and both sign-ability and game-ready experience took center stage. Higher-risk high school players dropped off draft boards altogether in favor of more physically mature college players, and teams selected less than 50 high school prospects. The majority of draft choices came out of college, and roughly the same number of SEC, ACC and Pac-12 players went to teams as the entire high school network.
The remaining prospects were left to face a decision to either sign a contract as an undrafted free agent or play 2021 in college. MLB capped its signing bonus pool money for those players not selected as levels substantially lower than the early-round slot values, a secondary impact after the NCAA erased 2020's impact on eligibility. That college ball also erased its 35-player maximum roster size all but assured enough slots for everyone.
"We talked about one of the things about our team, and we made sure they understood that this team is a veteran team with really good depth," Gambino said, "but if you look around the league, every tam in ACC is both veteran and deep. Teams right now have five classes on every roster, plus transfers and graduate transfers. So we're not unique in the experience and depth that we have, even though we can be unique in other ways. That's going to make for a fun year to watch college baseball."
It created a collision course, and the 2021 college baseball season now starts with arguably its deepest talent pool in the history of the sport. More than a dozen players from the MLB.com Top 100 prospects are in the ACC alone, and every team returns a player likely drafted by a pro team in a normal draft year. In addition, players like Carson Montgomery (Florida State) and Kevin Parada (Georgia Tech) both went undrafted out of high school and entered the league for at least three years.
It's that umbrella under which BC takes the field on Friday. Last year's team featured prime high round picks in Jack Cunningham and Brian Dempsey, and Dante Baldelli looked for a redraft after going to the Philadelphia Phillies out of high school. All three received their eligibility reset and rejoined a roster stocked with almost a dozen eligible selections.
Sal Frelick, Mason Pelio and Cody Morissette are all on that aforementioned MLB.com Top 100, with Frelick inside the Top 25 and Pelio as the preseason ACC Pitcher of the Year. Emmett Sheehan is draft eligible and could receive a bump with a big year in the starting rotation, and Alex Stiegler transferred to BC after four years at Yale that included an NCAA Tournament berth in 2019.
Former Freshman All-American Chris Galland is back on the roster after sitting out the 2020 season, and transfer Sean Harrington led Babson to the Division III College World Series second round elimination round in 2019.
Every team is in that same boat, and it highlights the high degrees of difficulty of the upcoming season. NCAA.com projected as many as 10 ACC teams in the national tournament this year, including Boston College, its fifth place team in the Atlantic Division, but it noted how every team is good enough to qualify for selection. The three dozen league games feature one series against almost every team, and for BC, that means games against everyone except Georgia Tech.
Seven teams are in the Top 25, led by Louisville at No. 5, and four are slotted between No. 13 and No. 17. It's an ACC wall headed by NC State and wedged only by West Virginia between the Wolfpack and Georgia Tech, Virginia and Wake Forest, but Miami looms behind all of them at No. 21. The Hurricanes, led by No. 4 overall prospect Adrian Del Castillo, brought in the No. 1 overall draft class and are situated just ahead of Florida State, which added its highest-rated recruit ever in Montgomery.
BC garnered its highest-ever preseason recognition but needs to prove something this weekend against Charleston Southern. There are plenty of believers ready to buy in on the Eagles, but the Buccaneers are one of those schools in a good baseball league in the Big South. They finished last season under .500, but split a four-game series with Kansas before rattling off five straight wins at one point. Their separate sweep of Delaware State was akin to the way BC battered Fairfield before the season stopped.
It was a high water mark for CSU after it upset third-seeded Radford in the Big South Tournament in 2019 and after a regular season win over the Highlanders in 2018. That same year, the Buccaneers took a weekend series win on the road against the defending regular season champion Winthrop, and they've managed to post respectable numbers at home, finishing over .500 in 2016, 2017 and 2019.
It came one year after the Buccaneers upset third-seeded Radford in the Big South Tournament two years after a regular season win over the Highlanders. During that same 2018 season, CSU took a weekend series on the road from the then-defending regular season champion Winthrop Eagles. In 2016, 2017 and 2019, the Buccaneers finished over .500 at Nielsen Field.
It will lead directly into league play with back-to-back weekends against Duke and Wake Forest. The series are the Eagles' only consecutive league road series on the schedule and precede the home opener on March 10 against Holy Cross. A second game against the Crusaders bookends the weekend at Louisville in a year where local competition will intersperse the most home league games in program history.
"We are really excited to have a schedule and really excited to get into home games," Gambino said. "This is a program that four years ago, in a normal year, we didn't know where those early home games would be played. So you can imagine what it would be like having to function this year during COVID, and on Shea Field, we wouldn't be able to function. The seniors that played there remember that, so to be able to see them and the number of home games, with an extra ACC home series, is really cool. It's another aspect of the Pete Frates Center and the Harrington Athletics Village that makes us excited as coaches just as much as the players are excited to get back on the field."
BC kicks off its three-game series against Charleston Southern on Friday, February 19 at 3 p.m. Saturday's game is tentatively scheduled for 1:30 p.m. with Sunday set to kick off at 12 p.m. The games against Duke are currently to be announced next weekend with broadcast information not yet announced.
Players Mentioned
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1B/OF
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IF
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IF/OF
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OF
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RHP
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RHP
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