Predicting the winner of the College World Series can be a difficult task. You wouldn’t be wrong to target an SEC team—it’s won three of the last four—or grab a winner from the Pac-12, which has three of the last 10. Still, teams like Fresno State or Coastal Carolina can seemingly emerge from anywhere and get hot at the right time.
There’s one way to narrow down the field, though. In the frenzy of regional play and double elimination, it’s no secret that having a deep and capable pitching staff is incredibly important. This article will lay out just how significant that edge is.
To do so, we’re using the offense and defense ratings that are featured at Massey Ratings. Both measure how the respective units—the lineup and the pitching staff/defense—would be expected to do against an average opponent.
Let’s take a look at the previous 10 College World Series winners. All 10 of them ranked in the top 20 in pitching/defense, while that was true of just six of 10 on the offensive side. What’s particularly interesting is that some of these winners were very unbalanced—see 2017 Florida, 2015 Virginia, and 2013 UCLA—but they made up for it by being truly elite at run prevention.
This table also shows how impressive Coastal Carolina’s run to the 2016 title was. It’s the only champion in the last 10 years to not rank inside the Top 15 in either category.
YEAR
NAME
OFF
DEF
2021
Mississippi State
17th
9th
2019
Vanderbilt
3rd
3rd
2018
Oregon State
1st
1st
2017
Florida
57th
5th
2016
Coastal Carolina
22nd
20th
2015
Virginia
33rd
7th
2014
Vanderbilt
8th
15th
2013
UCLA
43rd
1st
2012
Arizona
1st
13th
2011
South Carolina
18th
3rd
The emphasis on high-end pitching becomes more apparent when you look at the sample of the 80 College World Series participants over the last 10 years. Here they are, grouped by whether they were eliminated in bracket play, reached the CWS Finals, or won it all.
STATUS
AVERAGE RANK
OFF
DEF
Eliminated
25.1
13.6
Runner-Up
23.0
6.0
Won
20.3
7.7
You’ll note that the biggest difference…
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