College Baseball in OOTP
 

College baseball is not for the faint of heart. From big major conference ball clubs to the little bitty small ball clubs in the mid major conferences. Each club has a 1 in 258 chance in winning the national championship, or a 0.3875% chance each year. If everything was equal, you would have about a 40% chance of seeing your favorite college team lift the national championship in your lifetime. A good year would be just being in the playoff picture come the 1st of May. A great year would being making the playoffs. A fantastic year would be making it through six rounds of a best of seven series to be crowded the best college in all the land. 90 regular season games, at least 24 playoff games, six months of baseball with 258 teams, all in the hopes to be crowned the best. Do you have what it takes to be the best?

I love big games, when I make OOTP games I would make as many teams as I can without crashing my computer (it's seven years old). Last night instead of doing school work (oops) I decided to put every Division 1 College baseball team into the game. The 26 conferences are split into to leagues of 13 conferences each. The season runs from February to July culminating with the National Championship. There are 90 regular season games with 64 teams making the postseason playoffs. Each conference winner gets an automatic bid into the big dance with some conferences getting to bids (conferences with at least 12 teams) for 32 automatic bids. The other remaining teams come from the wildcard spots (17 wild card spots from the AL, 15 from the NL. My reasoning: there are 15 automatic bids in the AL, 17 in the NL). Every playoff series is in the 22111 format. Active roster limit is 25 and each team can have 15 reserves.

Now the big question: who did I take control of? To me, this is always a complicated question, no matter what game I play. I usually have reasons to play as many different teams. For example: Tennessee Volunteers, my favorite school; Monmouth Hawks or Rutgers Scarlet Knights, both close to my hometown; NJIT Highlanders, friends go there; PSU Nittney Lions, my SO's favorite team. With all of these choice it can usually take me at least 30 minutes to pick a team. However, I decided to chose none of these aforementioned trams. I decided to go with my older sister's alma matar: Lehigh University Mountain Hawks. I already finished my first season.

With an up-and-down second half of the season, can the Mountain Hawks play good enough baseball to stay within the NL WildCards? Tune in later to find out!

Year 2016 Review
 

Our preseason prediction was that we were going to finish with a record of 50-40 which would have just missed out on a playoff spot. We were predicted to finish two games behind the Navy Midshipmen for the conference title. Fortunately, for us, the season did not go according to the preseason predictions

We rolled out the season with what was in my opinion the best starting pitching in the National League
1. Terry Main (10-4, 2.47 ERA)
2. Carlos Camargo (12-4, 2.72 ERA)
3. Utaemon Urashima (8-3, 3.29 ERA)
4. Shane Balsley (7-6, 3.81 ERA)
5 Keith LaFargue (7-5, 3.14 ERA)

Every pitcher with the exception of Shane Balsley is rated 4.5 overall. As you can see the top half of the rotation pitched very well. Our major problem throughout the season was our bullpen, with a disheartening 3.57 ERA (57th in the NL out of 130). That number, at points, was up to 6.25 ERA. The bullpen is definitely something to look into in the offseason. As well as trying to strengthen our bullpen, I was to increase our batting skills, with the best stat being stolen bases at 40 good for 27th in the NL. But in order to get stolen bases you need to get on base. Our batting average was .256 good for 65th in the NL. That statistic is our second best batting statistic.

The last thing I would like to improve in the offseason is our performance on the road. At home, we were 33-12 and away from home we were 21-24. You can't be under .500 really in any stat and expect to be a playoff contending team. Which was probably why I was happy when we scraped into the playoffs. In February we started 7-7 in which, I'll be honest, the team wasn't gelling very well. Our breakout month was March in which we went 19-9 to be fighting for first place in the conference and an automatic bid into the big dance. In April and May the team went 14-12 and 14-8 respectively which is decent, but not when the competition all around is winning three and four more games each month. Needless to say, we scarped into the playoffs by finishing 8th out of the available 15 wildcard spots. We were pitted against UC Irvine who won the Big West Conference at a commanding 52-28, 7.5 games ahead of second placed UC Davis.

The first two games of the series were at Lehigh, something I felt that if we were going to have chance in this series we needed to win both games. Our road record was against us in the playoffs. Sadly, we lost the first game 3-2 to go down early. My optimistic self wasn't to optimistic anymore. The second game we won 1-0 in a pitchers' duel. I was happy that we didn't need to use our bullpen in that game. Then the two games at UC Irving. Needless to say we lost both of those games (2-0, 10-0) to go down 3-1 and effectively writing us out of the playoffs. And, to no surprise, we lost game 5 7-11 to lose our very first playoff series. But I can be proud of the boys for making it into the playoffs this year as it wasn't expected. I can be even more proud that we ended up losing to the eventual national champions so our loss isn't too bittersweet. UC Irvine beat Lehigh 4-1, Holy Cross 4-1, Arizona State 4-1, UCLA 4-3, Sam Houston State 4-1, and finally Eastern Kentucky 4-2 to win its first ever national championship. Looking forward to next season I would like to continue our playoff push and win our first ever playoff series.

Tune in next time to see how the 2017 season transpires!