The ironic part in this whole discussion of Bakich that people don’t seem to realize is that there is an internal hierarchy of some sports that benefits Michigan football greatly and will hurt Michigan baseball. Just kind of the way it is.
Michigan poaches players/staff/resources from lesser programs all the time for football. It will also get poached for the same things by better baseball programs. Just the way it is, for several reasons.
One thing that benefits michigan in a huge way in baseball recruiting and big draw to Bakich originally, is um has robust financial aid like most elite schools with big endowments. Basically lets you put a kid on a partial and use the financial aid to pay the rest. It’s why schools like vandy and Stanford are always so loaded and it drives sec coaches insane. Pretty much vandys entire team is on full rides because of the vandy promise deal(believe it’s if parents make under 100k tuition is covered).
I get that we have structural disadvantages in baseball, but we made the national title game in 2019, and made the tournament several other times under Bakich. We can be a good program in this sport, even if not at the very elite.
Woah 
Right, and Bakich went somewhere he can be elite
Naurato just casually finding the hockey version of Andrew Rohde down to the school he played for. Love to see it folks.
Also re: baseball, even under Bakich and what I sense is his pretty nearly elite ability to get talent, the facilities and assistant coaching stuff for UM and, I’d guess, the B1G in general is a biiiiig gap. In particular, the difference in the data + tools + personnel infrastructure is significant which means all the positive feedback loops that you get at e.g. Vandy are just much worse/slower. So even if you land a similar caliber recruit, you’re looking at a worse outcome for that guy.
Yeah like Michigan could pay Bakich what he’s getting at Clemson but to actually be good at baseball at a level that goblue8 is claiming (on par with the southern schools) they’d have to drop a lot of money into all aspects of the program, and that’s just way tougher in the B1G cause no one cares about college baseball. I think you basically have to choose to be good at hockey or baseball, being good at both would take a pretty huge monetary investment, well beyond just matching Bakich’s salary
I dk, I still think getting the data + gear + SaaS infrastructure set up properly really isn’t THAT hard or expensive. But I think generating that, like, culture of feedback and getting personnel who are paid enough to get invested…that’s why I wish the AD would jump in there and centralize that stuff. There’s potential for scale in some of this stuff if you do it right.
Heck, hire Andrew Patton, he’s an alum and he’s doing it for the NFL rn. Plus then he could give us a behind the scenes tour of DARKO.
I guess I have no idea how much money the university is investing in sports like baseball. On the one hand, I can totally see how they would rather throw money at football than anything else. On the other hand, they are supposed to be a non-profit and have to spend their athletic budget somewhere so why not give the all-gender monopoly team a jacuzzi or better yet - make sure baseball has the right analytics tools?
While it will NEVER happen, I actually am intrigued by Seth @ MGoBlog’s idea of breaking off baseball from the NCAA and treating it like a minor league sport. In the summer you see all the college kids go play club ball anyway and a lot of families go out to those “independent league” games in the dog days of summer - let’s make B10 stadiums like that! Near where we live there is the Kenosha Kingfish (a college summer independent league) and the Chicago Dogs (a professional independent league). I’d pay to take the family to a B10 game in June or July.
I believe that’s more Craig’s idea than Seth’s, and I’m not sure it’s original with him. He says Bill Martin was for it and was prepared to push for it. So it’s been around a while.
Seth is more famous for the “Michigan is a mid-major in baseball” quote, which he made on the same Roundtable.
Oh I’ll add too that Chris Fetter was WILDLY well respected in baseball circles and the fact that he didn’t go to the Yankees and did eventually go to the Tigers tells you a decent amount about the state of the program. He’s from that Dodgers development lab and if he had been invested in he really really could have built something. He’s mentioned in The MVP Machine along with a few other quotes that make it clear that circa 2019 that college pitching programs were often WAY better than MLB. Michigan could’ve ended up there.
Yeah basically my point, um could have a top baseball program if they gave it top resources. Weather is not why um’s baseball program has a ceiling. Also michigan is about to be making 100mil/yr from the b1g, they can afford fundings top notch baseball program. I get the whole what about other coaches at um with more successful programs but their sports financial commitment marketplace just isn’t where baseballs is.
Oh my thing is that it doesn’t actually take too much $$ and you can play moneyball at that level still if you dig in hard on development. You do need a guy like Fetter to lead that culture and draw on his network tho.
Didn’t Tracy Smith pretty much do the same thing at IU that Bakich did at UM?
I think the portal/NIL era, it’s really going to be difficult for Michigan baseball to be much more than a consistent NCAA tourney participant. We could spend all we want on facilities. And even if you spend big on coaches, they’re going to move on to schools with more natural advantages like Bakich did. Easier to deal with NIL, transfers, recruiting. Can’t change the weather and the population base. Softball had one of the greatest coaches of all time and we won one national title.
Big shout out to Savannah Sutherland on her record breaking (her personal best by almost a second and UM record, as well as the under 23 record) NCAA Championship in the 400 M Hurdles!
https://twitter.com/i/status/1667724136339128320
The following programs won the Big Ten in their most recent season:
It is annoying and frustrating to tennis fans that OSU is a powerhouse. It’s one thing to lose to Georgia Texas ir a California school, but losing to Ohio stinks.
It always just sucks (not a word I particularly like 
) losing to Ohio (nor an outcome, either!). In fact in the words of Harry Chapin’s brothers when Harry was trying to write the ending to “30,000 Pounds of Bananas,” “Harry (Dirk)…it SUCKS,” a phrase subsequently repeated by Harry’s fans at every concert thereafter! 