by Carl James • @jovian34 • May 20

Only Minor Changes from Sunday Action

The Hoosiers are idle until the B1G Tournament starts on Wednesday, but serveral automatic bids were earned and some west coast teams were in action. Stanford lost and drops to the overall #9 national seed advancing Arkansas to the #8.

Automatic Bids

Three more automatic bids were earned on Sunday. In the PATRIOT Army pulls off the upset over Navy denying a great chance for Noah Song to knock off a host making many college baseball fans very sad. In the IVY LEAGUE Harvard wins as expected and in the SWAC, Southern takes the crown.

Stolen Bids

Right now the last at-large slot is at #48. If a team that is currently assumed to be the automatic bid for their conference losses their conference tournament title to a team not worthy of an at-large bid, both teams will possibly make the field. This will “steal” the last at-large bid. Normally we would expect the line to be drawn at #45 which would happen with three stolen bids. in 2018 their was only one stolen bid, while in 2017 there were six. The last four in are all rooting for as few stolen bids as possible.

Steal Potential by Conference:

HIGH POTENTIAL STEALS (no particular order - just counting) 1. Big Ten 2. Big 12 3. Atlantic 10 4. Mountain West 5. American Athletic 6. Big East 7. Missouri Valley 8. Conference USA LOW POTENTIAL STEALS 1. SEC - most are at-large 2. Big West - no tourney - leader is an at-large 3. ACC - most are at-large IMPOSSIBLE TO STEAL 1. Pac-12 - no tourney - all who could win are clear at-large teams

About the Model

Bracket predictions are all over the place now on just about any site that covers national Division I College baseball. This field is different. I am not “projecting” with this bracket. This is if the committee had to put the field together today. This is generated by a computer program that I wrote to rank the teams and take multiple factors like geography into account when assigning teams to regionals. This is results-based, using an approximation of techniques to try an match the priorities the NCAA committee showed in the 2018 tournament selection.

Hosts by conference:

SEC: 5, Pac-12: 3, Big 12: 3, ACC: 3, Big West and American: 1 each

Lasts in/firsts out: