TOURNAMENT RESULTS
Check out Friday's action of the Big 12 baseball tournament
The Big 12 baseball tournament is broken. And it's not repairable under the current format.
The marquee game of the tournament's first three days was OSUBaylor. It featured two of the Big 12's three teams who figure to host NCAA regionals, plus a local team with a good following. The winner would be in great shape to make the Big 12 championship game.
And the OSU-Baylor game started at 9:45 p.m. Thursday. It ended at 12:28 a.m.
A game scheduled to start at 7:30 p.m. started two hours, 15 minutes later and ended well after midnight.
The night before was better, but only marginally. The OSU-TCU game scheduled to start at 8:57 p.m. and ended at 11:43 p.m.
College baseball is a sport that wants to raise its marketability for both ticket sales and broadcasts. But games that are scheduled to start at 7:30 and end either approaching midnight or sailing past it are not tenable.
And this is an annual occurrence at Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark. The Big 12's eight-team format, with four games scheduled each of the first two days, doesn't work for baseball. The games can't start early enough to allow them to end early enough.
OSU's two games actually were well-played: 2:46 and 2:43. They
didn't drag. But games often do. That's the nature of baseball. It's on its own timetable.
An eight-team tournament is not a well-oiled machine.
I don't know the answer. Maybe there's not a question. Maybe the Big 12 baseball programs are OK with a tournament that is untenable.
But it's not marketable. The conference baseball tournament thrived when it was the Big Eight and only four teams qualified. That's when All Sports
Stadium often was packed with OSU and OU fans. The Big 12 formed in 1997, and the first two years of the tournament, only six teams qualified.
Then came the eight-team field, but it was the early days of Bricktown Ballpark and fans were excited to be there, even if the schedule was chaotic.
No more. How do you sell a tournament in which the marquee game starts at 9:45 p.m. on a worknight? It's madness.
I don't know what the
answer is. Play some of the games on auxiliary fields? A friend of mine texted me during the OU-TCU debacle Thursday — the Horned Frogs won 15-3 — and wrote, “They really should play these elimination games simultaneously to the winners bracket games. They could play them over at Douglas(s) HS.” He wasn't kidding. You can't play the Big 12 Tournament at Douglass High School, but if you're going to have eight teams, either
you give up on trying to market the event or you find a way to split the games into separate venues.
Heck, there's talk that the Big 12 would like to take the tournament back to Arlington, Texas, and play in the Rangers' new ballpark, which opens next season. And the Rangers are not tearing down the glorious Ballpark in Arlington, which has been renamed Globe Life Park. The Big 12 could play in both ballparks, old and new.
I have no idea if that would work. Crowds of 1,500 in stadiums that seat more than 40,000 is not a good look.
But there are few options. Play in lessquality stadiums? Spread out the tournament over more days? Or just live with it?
Living with it probably is the answer. But that means it's an event that fans can't rally around and cities can't market.
And games will start two hours late and end after midnight.