OMAHA, Neb. -- One-and-a-half hours before college baseball's national championship series started, downtown Omaha was dead. An hour before the first pitch, The Blatt was blah. That would be Rosenblatt Stadium, site of the College World Series for almost 60 years.
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| Georgia All-America closer Joshua Fields shows some passion during a tourney that is lacking buzz. (AP) |
"Without a doubt," said Georgia coach David Perno, whose team is one game away from a championship after a 7-6 victory over Fresno State in Game 1 of the championship series Monday night.
"It's real simple. It's a tremendous experience but I stayed up watching the Miami game film last night. I felt like it was last year."
That Miami game -- a 7-4 Georgia CWS win on June 14 -- was nine days ago. Georgia has been here 12 days since getting to its hotel at 4 a.m. on June 12 because of plane problems. It had played all of three games before Monday night. After winning their first two, the Bulldogs went four days without playing a game. Part of that had to do with a Thursday rainout but part of it had to do with the NCAA extending the College World Series further into a second week. If the Georgia-Fresno championship series goes to a deciding Game 3 on Wednesday, the CWS itself will have lasted 12 days. If that's the case Georgia will return home more than two weeks after leaving Athens.
And folks are worried about a college football playoff being taxing on players.
"It was tough, we got really restless," said Georgia star Gordon Beckham, whose eighth-inning home run started Monday's comeback from a 6-3 deficit. "Thursday at practice, everybody just got mad. Everybody wanted to be out there playing. You could tell we were getting kind of itchy, talking bad to each other. ... Then when it rained out we were really, really upset. We wanted to play. We didn't want to get sick of Omaha."
The rainout forced Georgia to wait another day to play. A built-in off day for the teams on Sunday had to be used to decide Georgia's championship series opponent. Fresno beat North Carolina on Sunday night to advance but had next to no pitching left for Game 1 on Monday. Closer Brandon Burke had little life left in his arm after throwing two innings the previous night. He took the loss Monday after allowing Georgia to rally in the eighth.
In getting this far, Fresno has been on the road since mid-May. That's a lot of airplanes and a lot of hotels to chase a championship in a sport that typically isn't a revenue producer.
"Nothing negative but I think it's a little bit too long," said Perno, who is trying to win the school's first baseball championship since 1990. "I think they play too many games."
Perno was a Georgia player on that '90 title team. The entire CWS that year took nine days. But the event has gotten bigger and more popular. A championship series was added in 2003. Certainly, a best-of-3 final was fairer to the teams than a single championship game, but all this baseball has begun taxing wallets as well as attention spans. Beginning this year ESPN moved the series to prime time starting on Monday. Prior to this year, the series started on Saturday, meaning the latest it could end was on Monday.
So while the product might look good on television, it's starting to get on everyone's nerves.
Although the CWS is less than 16,000 away from setting another attendance record, it's obvious that stretching this much baseball into this long a period has tired even the players and fans who love the game so much. The tickets might have been sold but fans aren't showing up to occupy all the seats.
