After a 27-year-long hiatus, the Big West tournament is back, with the top five regular season teams vying for an automatic berth to the NCAA Tournament.
The Big West is the last baseball conference to make the switch over to a conference tournament.
With the introduction of the Big West Tournament, the conference moves away from the European soccer style of deciding a champion through the regular season standings and into a tournament format that is more familiar to the collegiate sports sphere.
If you ask around the Cal Poly Baseball squad, you will get mum answers about it. They don’t view the regular season any differently because there is a tournament at the end of the road.
“I think you could take a different mindset like ‘Oh we only need to get to the top [five] to make the tournament’,” senior Ryan Fenn said in the preseason. “I just think if we kept the same mindset as previous years where it’s you gotta be one or two… it will guarantee that you’re in the top [five].”
“Our goal is always to win our conference,” Head Coach Larry Lee said before the season started. “We don’t have the luxury of starting out slow the two or three weeks then get it rolling.”
But if you aren’t directly involved with the team, the tournament is important to look forward to.
What is at stake
The prize at the end of the proverbial rainbow that is the Big West tournament is the automatic bid to the NCAA postseason.
To get the Big West tournament crown, Cal Poly first has to lock up a top-five spot in the Big West regular season. From there, they will have to play anywhere from three to six games in a double-elimination tournament in Fullerton to take the crown as Big West champions.
The tournament couldn’t come at a better time either for the Mustangs.
As a mid-major school, blemishes on Cal Poly’s record really sting. Losses and wins are not equivalent in the RPI and it takes multiple wins to make up for a loss.
The series loss against UC Santa Barbara was already a major knock on their resume. Getting swept at home by UC Irvine could very well prove to be the death knell to their chances at a potential at-large bid.
The Mustang’s RPI sits at No. 31 as of Wednesday, April 30, It was No. 19 heading into the weekend. It potentially was the worst possible time for Cal Poly to get swept. Of their remaining 11 games they fail to play a team that is even in the top 200 for RPI.
Sweeping out the remaining games will help their ranking, but it will not move the needle.
With 35 at-large bids up for grabs this year in theory Cal Poly should be in, especially if they win all of their remaining 10 regular season games.
On the other hand, they are 3-12 against Quad 1 teams, against the best of the best in college baseball they have faltered and that is something the committee will hold against them when it comes time to select the field of 64.
Removing the randomness
Baseball is a game of long-term averages. It is why the MLB plays 162 games instead of 82 or 17. Over those 162 games, more often than not, outliers return to the mean, and the best teams come out on top.
Compare that to the 30-game Big West conference schedule, roughly 18 percent of an MLB season. Take the 2024 season, where Cal Poly took two games from each of the top two teams in the conference, UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine, but still finished in a tie for third place.
The Mustangs could have been a better team than the Anteaters and the Gauchos as the head-to-head results indicated.
The Mustangs also could have been a worse team than the Anteaters and the Gauchos as the end-of-season standings indicated. You could make the argument both ways, but without more data, it is a fruitless endeavor.
In the regular season, the three games played against a team do mean something and were a measuring stick, but that was only one-tenth of the games that mattered. You still had 27 other games against the rest of the Big West.
Some years, teams got lucky and had a tough series at home. Other times, they would get unlucky and have to go on the road into a hostile environment or a three-hour time zone change.
The problem with a tournament is that it falls even harder into the trap of a small sample size.
All it takes is a bad hop or a blown call, and a team’s tournament is over like that.
Still, it is a more straightforward and definite way to decide a champion. Turn the lights on bright and roll the ball out there, luck or not, every team directly controls its own destiny.
The Big West Tournament will take place at Goodwin Field in Fullerton from May 21 through May 25. The top five regular-season finishers in the Big West will battle it out to determine who is the Big West champion.
