I've been paying pretty close attention to the NCAA Division 1 college baseball tournament, for the same reason I do every year:
Upsets abound. The teams are broken up into 16 groups of four — a "regional" — and in each of the 16 regions, teams are seeded #1 (the #1 seeds also get to host these groups and all the games therein) down to #4. In other words, there are 64 teams in all, and the 16 #4 seeds are the equivalent to #13-#16 teams in the Big Dance.
Except, this being baseball, upsets are more common. The following #4 seeds all won multiple games in their regional: St. Mary's, Little Rock (won their regional), Wisconsin-Milwaukee, St. John's (won their regional).
The 16 winners of the regionals get to go on to the super regionals, where each of the 16 teams are paired off in a best-of-three series. Those eight remaining go to Omaha to play in the College World Series in Omaha.
Alas, neither Little Rock (who made a Cinderella run last year, too) nor St John's (more on them in a minute) won their Super Regional, but Murray State did last year as a #4 seed. We still have a semi-Cinderella, I would argue, in #3 seed Troy who knocked Little Rock out in a super regional where none of the top two seeds from their respective regionals got out of their group.
So the Cinderella angle is always fun. You know what's not fun? The way no team from cities with real winters ever make it to the CWS anymore. I always monitor the last one to fall. Often, that's in super regional round — just barely missing the college world series. So this year, St. John's came the closest.
It's easy to understand why teams from the Southern and Western U.S. dominate college baseball; weather permits them to play all year, or close enough. But it wasn't until I looked into it more deeply for this article that I came to understand just how pervasive and longstanding that phenomenon is. I knew the Big Ten had done pretty well in the CWS in the '50s and '60s, so I figured the sunshine requirement went back only about 20-30 years. I was very wrong.
I define "cities with real winters" as "gets as much snow in an average winter as my hometown of Akron, Ohio does." I'm fairly generous with that definition. What I would count would qualify all of the Northeast, almost all of the Midwest, and Rocky Mountain states. And yet, the last four schools that I deign snow-approved who made the CWS are all schools that a hybrid Akron and Ohio State fan like myself are born to hate: Michigan, Notre Dame (twice), and Kent State.
The last school outside of those four from a place with sufficiently snowy winters for me to count it? Maine, in the year of our lord 1986, who apparently used to be something of a college baseball powerhouse.
But you know what? I spent a miserable 2014 in Maine, and so I kinda hate them too! The early '80s were awash in Michigan and Maine appearances, and so the last school that a) qualifies as a snow city in my book, and b) I well and truly do not hate them, you have to go back to 1980.
The team? St. John's.
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