FUN BASEBALL TIME-WASTER

I've been having fun with Baseball Reference's collegiate pages, which gives all the universities which have produced major league ballplayers. There are a lot of colleges out there. What I've been wondering is: Which of the umpteen schools that produced but one player produced the best one? Mark Redman, for example, is the only MLB product of that well-known institution of higher learning, The Master's College. Rusty Greer was a University of Montevallo Mustang. Dan Pasqua went to William Paterson. Not exactly names to conjure with, no, but they had respectable careers. Most of these guys were lucky to get a cup of coffee--like Jeff Shaver, SUNY Fredonia's claim to Major League fame, with one inning pitched in 1988.

Thus far the best I've been able to come up with is Wade Miller, the sole big-leaguer to come out of the fabled Alvernia College baseball system. Nobody from their 2004 squad is jumping out at me as a possible successor, either. That may be a factor of their environment, though--look at that opponents' ERA!

I love college baseball. With lots of scoring and regular field-position players with .815 fielding percentages, the games are just a hoot. You see something new every day. I remember a couple of years ago, in the Big 12 tournament, Baylor self-destructing against Texas--blowing a seven-run lead or something like that on virtually all unearned runs--capped off by throwing an intentional-walk pitchout right over the plate for a wild pitch. Then UT blew that lead with some improbable play. It's craziness from top to bottom--but not the same kind of insanity that you sometimes find at the high-school level. Brr. I don't know how many times games in our tiny league had batters reaching on dropped third strikes, but it was an awful lot. Big-League baseball has evolved to the point where everyone on the field basically knows what they're doing almost all the time, which is hard to appreciate unless you see a fair bit of lower-level baseball--where, even after years of play, the folks on the field are still learning on the job. Baseball's hard.

It goes without saying, of course, that I could no more make Alvernia's team than become an astronaut. Another joy of watching almost any level of organized ball is watching people better than you do something you wish you could do...