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Ghosts

I've been doing some more historical reconstruction here lately. I'm specifically working on 1996, but I'm trying to go ahead and grab as many game scores as I can along the way, so I'm getting a good look in some cases at days gone by. That's always a fascinating thing to do, since it shows ways that not only has the game changed, but our society has changed -- I ran across one season for a team that was abandoned with a month or so to go as the result of a meningitis outbreak on campus, for example.

Looking at the results from a time when the game was much more regional (and the regions were smaller) than now led me to notice that there were times when schools that you wouldn't have thought of appeared to be more dominant than you would have expected. The big conferences have been essentially unchanged over the years, although the Ivy League has lost most of the athletic greatness that it enjoyed in the early years, but there have always been exceptions, the Cal State Fullerton's of their day. This, combined with the coming quasi-holiday here in the U. S. featuring lots of ghosts, got me to thinking about the question I want to take a shot at today: What's the best season ever by a school that no longer has a team?

Since the question came to me that way, I'll stick with it, which rules out a couple of good contenders who still play at lower levels -- the 1954 Rollins Tars are probably the best of those, as they won their first three games in Omaha before losing the last two to finish as runner-up. Rollins is now, of course, a perennial contender in Division II.

The first avenue at looking at this doesn't necessarily work -- just looking at the results from Omaha isn't completely telling. The champions list has no help at all -- even almost 60 years later, all of the previous champs are still around, and all but a few (the Big 10 teams and Holy Cross) wouldn't be at all surprising if they won it in 2007. The runners-up list is a bit more interesting (did you know that Eastern Michigan had to lose two in a row to Arizona in 1976 to keep from winning it all?), but all but one are still playing (more on that in just a minute), and only Rollins has left D1.

That leads us to the fact that, up until at least the mid-'50's, getting to Omaha wasn't always all that impressive. The regions (or districts, as they were then called) were allowed to set their own criteria for representation, and some of them were a little sparse to start with. Therefore, you end up with things like Springfield College (still playing in D3) getting invited in 1951 and 1955. They did manage to beat Texas A&M in 1951, so they weren't completely overmatched, but they probably weren't a top 10 team.

Here, then, is a list formed from a combination of CWS results and old conference standings, ordered by my best guess of how impressive they were in reverse order. This is an area where I'd love to get some feedback, especially from anyone who was there, so let me hear from you (as an aside, let me say thank you for all the feedback on the race column, some of which I haven't been able to answer yet).

• Detroit Mercy, 1965, 24-6, independent. One of the big problems with this sort of analysis, of course, is trying to figure out the context of a given record. My reasoning is that winning 80% of your games is tough in almost any context, and that these were the days when Big 10 teams were still winning national titles, so the region was at least competitive. I don't have their actual schedule, though, so I could be quite off on this one.

• Providence, 1999, 49-16, Big East. This was almost certainly the most impressive last season that anyone has had. The Friars were in the Big East race until the end, got an at large bid to the dance, and then managed a couple of wins in the Florida State regional before hanging them up for good.

• Southern Methodist, 1953, 15-6, SWC. Here we head into the territory of teams who played for a long time without much to show for it. In over sixty years in the Southwest Conference, which was admittedly one of the nation's toughest for most of that time, this was the Mustangs only conference title, and it was a tie for first. They were second once or twice, and the rest of the time it was really bad. Adding insult to injury, their co-champ Texas was chosen to represent the conference in the postseason. On the other hand, they do at least have this year, and there are teams that never got that -- Drake and Wyoming, for example, seemed to play for a very long time without ever really getting the hang of it.

• Iowa State, 1924, 12-4, Big Six. Things for Iowa State weren't quite as woeful; they managed to win this Big Six title and three Big Eight titles along the way. This was probably the most dominant of the group, and this probably would have been the district representative to Omaha if such a thing had been invented yet.

• Oregon, 1937, 12-2, PCC North. In contrast to the two above, Oregon was the dominant team in the PCC North for most of the '30's and '40's and was competitive through the '50's and '60's. This may have been the best of their teams, although it's hard to get a good feel for that question, since I can't find overall records for any of their seasons. The more interesting question is how good the PCC North was. It was conventional wisdom that the CIBA and later Six-Pack was much better and that the PCC North didn't rate on the national stage, but the results from the one-conference experiment from 1968-1971 gave mixed results, and the Northern teams have been quite competitive, to say the least, in the decade since the merger.

• Tulsa, 1969, 36-3, MVIAA. This is the one CWS runner-up to have vanished. The MVIAA of the time was fairly close in quality, relatively speaking, to the MVC of today, reasonably classified as a mid-major, and Tulsa won their district over some good competition before heading on to go 3-2 in Omaha and finish second. This wasn't anywhere close to their only good team, either -- the 1971 team finished third in the CWS, and the team put up great records every year from 1967 to 1974. They were still competitive in the MVC, although they hadn't won in a while, when they dropped the sport after 1980. Tulsa dropping the sport then was almost exactly equivalent to what the situation would be if Wichita State were to drop baseball this year, an event that would shock and dismay everyone.

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