College Baseball Countdown: 1 Day to Go - Warmer Weather

The weather has not been kind to college baseball in many parts of the country early in the season over the last two years.

I spent the last two college baseball seasons living in the Midwest, so I’m in a unique position to speak to this. On opening day for the last two seasons, it has either been snowing or there was still snow piled up on the ground from a recent snowstorm.

But it wasn’t just the Midwest and the Northeast (the usual suspects when it comes to early-season inclement weather) that spent the first half of their seasons bundled up and on the road.

There were plenty of examples from just last season.

North Carolina and UCLA had to move their marquee non-conference series from Chapel Hill to Orlando just to be able to play. Certainly that was a great experience for Orlando-area alums of the two schools or any college baseball fans in the area, but it wasn’t great for traveling fans and families of the two teams who had already made plans to be in North Carolina.

Georgia and Florida State played part of their early-season series while snowflakes fell, which was an odd sight in Athens, Georgia, the site of so many sweltering games in the past. Similar conditions took place in Oxford, Mississippi, during a series between the home-standing Rebels and Wright State. Certainly that had to be a disappointment to the Raiders, who probably assumed that they were going to get a welcome respite from harsh temperatures over that weekend.

The most extreme example might just be what eventual national champions Virginia had to deal with. They weren’t able to play a home game of any kind until March 11 of last year, and they didn’t have a weekend series at home until March 20 when they hosted Florida State.

Their second weekend of the season was supposed to be a home series against Marist, but they had to move that series to Charleston, South Carolina at the last minute. The good news there was that they were able to pick up a fourth game against LaSalle that weekend, but the bad news was that the strange schedule forced them to play games at four different locations in the area, including one game at a high school field.

That’s all to say nothing of the many teams located in harsher climes that are just begging to be able to even practice outdoors sometime before the month of April.

Things can change quickly, but to this point, we’ve kind of lucked out in the preparations for this season. The fall was pretty warm and so has much of the preseason lead up to the season. My Twitter feed over the last few weeks has been littered with images of teams practicing outside that don’t normally have the chance to get outside in late-January and early-February.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that our run of good fortune continues. It’s not really in any of our control, but here’s hoping that the early-season weather is a little better in 2016. The college baseball world deserves it.