Why College Baseball Lags And How To Fix It

Want the truth about why college baseball lags behind MLB, college football, and college basketball? We pull back the curtain on the real blockers—slow pace, bloated reviews, and scarce TV windows—and lay out a practical blueprint that preserves the game’s joy while fixing what turns casual fans away. From pitch clock enforcement to tighter replay standards and smarter distribution, we highlight the moves that can unlock growth without losing the sport’s soul.

We also zoom out to the SEC, where sustained excellence keeps rewriting the record book. The numbers are clear: a pipeline of elite programs stacking College World Series appearances and national titles. Against that backdrop, we take a hard look at Georgia’s trajectory under Wes Johnson. With an older, transfer-driven roster and ample power, the hinge rests on whether the pitching staff can finally stabilize and show up in June. Being great in April sets the stage; getting hot at the right time closes the season.

Then we pivot to the Atlanta Braves and a familiar risk: betting big on fragile arms. Last year’s injuries exposed how thin a rotation can get over 162 games. Even with bullpen help, this team needs a dependable starter who can carry innings and a Triple-A arm ready for call-ups when the inevitable hits. Hope is not a strategy; depth is. We make the case for action now so the Braves aren’t forced into panic moves later.

If you’re passionate about the future of college baseball, curious about Georgia’s ceiling, or fired up about the Braves’ next step, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share with a friend, and drop your take—what single change would most improve the sport or the Braves’ season?

Chapters

• 0:12 Setting The Agenda: All Baseball
• 1:07 Why College Baseball Trails In Popularity
• 2:35 Pace Of Play And Pitch Clock Debate
• 4:18 Replay Overload And Fan Friction
• 7:28 Access Problem: TV And Streaming Gaps
• 8:38 How To Grow College Baseball
• 9:02 SEC Dominance By The Numbers
• 11:11 Georgia’s Postseason Wall
• 13:21 Can Wes Johnson Fix The Pitching
• 15:36 Braves Injuries And Roster Bets
• 18:06 The Case For Adding A Starter
• 21:10 Closing Thoughts And Listener Questions

Transcript

Why College Baseball Trails In Popularity

Pace Of Play And Pitch Clock Debate

Replay Overload And Fan Friction

Access Problem: TV And Streaming Gaps

How To Grow College Baseball

SEC Dominance By The Numbers

Georgia’s Postseason Wall

Can Wes Johnson Fix The Pitching

Braves Injuries And Roster Bets

The Case For Adding A Starter

Closing Thoughts And Listener Questions

SPEAKER_00 0:12

This is sports takes with Nate Skates. No spin, just straight sports. So, college baseball gets underway this week. On this episode, I want to talk about the state of college baseball. What keeps the sport from being as popular as other sports like college football, college basketball, and major league baseball? And what can be done about it? What can we do to expand the reach of college baseball? I'll also give a preview of Georgia's season. And later in the show, I'll talk the Atlanta Braves some news, including how failure to learn from last year's mistakes and a wave of injuries already could land the Braves in a similar situation to last season. So today's an all-baseball show. We'll talk about all of that here today. So as college baseball gets started this week, I want to briefly address a question. Why is college baseball so much less popular than either Major League Baseball or other college sports, particularly college football and college basketball? There isn't one quick answer to this question, but there are several things that are holding college baseball back from being a more widely watched sport. First off, is just simply the sport. Baseball has struggled to compete with sports like football for the American attention. Baseball is often a lot more slower paced, more deliberate, less high octane action. And with people's attention spans growing shorter and shorter, you can barely get people to watch a short, much less a full baseball game. Part of that is unavoidable for baseball. It's just the nature of the game. However, other aspects could be avoidable. Major League Baseball has really halted its reported decline, protracted decline over the course of several years by implementing changes that brought more fun and quicker pacing to the games. For example, many of those unwritten rules for Major League Baseball, such as bat flipping or watching a home run being met with a pitch at your head, have been taken out of baseball. Watch an MLB or college baseball game in the last few years. There's more celebrating, more uh rituals and uh dances after hitting a home run or making a big play on the diamond than often there are after a touchdown. So college baseball has already done a lot of that. There's a lot of celebrating, a lot of fun in college baseball. But what college baseball has to improve and has tried to do is the pace of play. The total time invested to play a game isn't really even the key factor. A college football game is about three and a half to four hours long. College baseball games average three hours to three hours and 15 minutes usually, but a four-hour college baseball game feels a lot longer than a four-hour college football game. And some baseball purists uh hate the pitch clock, and they hate the rules limiting the number of times a player can't call timeout, the number of times a pitcher can step off, but they're wrong in my opinion. What we had before the pitch clock, whether it's Major League Baseball or college baseball, and before some of these limitations on the amount of time batters were able to take, you had batters calling timeout after every pitch. They were readjusting their gloves three times each after every pitch. They were going through their ritual after every single pitch, taking a timeout, stepping out of the box, readjusting all their equipment. We had pitchers stepping off multiple times, throwing over the first four or five times before they throw another pitch. And you also just had pitchers who were taking entirely too long to throw the ball, trying to disrupt the rhythm of the hitter. That isn't enjoyable to watch. Sorry, I don't want to watch guys redo their gloves 12 different times each at bat. That's not in that's not an enjoyable thing to watch. That not only makes the full game time longer, it also interrupts the action. It slows the pace of the game. After making these changes, the MLB's game times have dropped dramatically. Most games are under or at three hours long. I've watched MLB games that are right about or even under two hours total in the last couple of seasons. That has been a win for Major League Baseball. Uh MLB's popularity has really rebounded since making these changes. College baseball has tried to make some similar changes. They had a pitch clock previously that was not really enforced. Here in the last couple of years, college baseball has re-implemented the pitch clock and is trying to be more strict with the enforcement. But college baseball really needs to strictly adhere to that rule because currently college baseball still takes significantly longer than an MLB game. And it's not just pitch clocks or timeouts. College baseball has far too many stoppages of play. I have hardly watched a Georgia baseball game in the last few years that didn't have numerous stoppages for review that often take several minutes. And it's not only just that, but sometimes it's never communicated to the fan. It's may not even be communicated to the announcers, uh, who a lot of times in college baseball are not even at the stadium, what is being reviewed. You may sit there for 10 minutes and have no clue what's happening. That's that's not enjoyable for the fan to just sit there watching umpires look at a monitor and having no idea what we're even looking at. And no game typifies this better than the 2024 Georgia-Mississippi State game in Starkville. Uh Mississippi State catcher Johnny Long had, as Dave Neal described it, an out-of-body experience and just lost it after uh tagging out George's Dylan Carter at home plate. Long kept getting on top of Carter, yelling at him, kneeing him in the ribs. It was a really weird situation to watch. So that should have been an immediate ejection for Long and later a suspension, and that'd be the end of the deal. However, benches ended up clearing, and the SEC chose to stop the whole game, conduct a 30-minute review, and 11 players were suspended. It was really absurd. I mean, you you had a full stoppage of the game for 30 minutes trying to watch every single player on the field. And really, that was a situation where only one guy should have been suspended. There shouldn't have been any long review coming down from the SEC. So college baseball has got to cut out some of these reviews, and college basketball has been dealing with this too. There's far too many stoppages of play, uh, way too much going to the monitor. And so that isn't really a baseball-only problem with review, but college baseball to me does it worse than anybody else over the last few years. It's really made it hard to watch a game because so frequently you are stopping the game to look at the monitor. Now, this is an issue not about the product. College baseball is rarely ever on TV. Uh, you have to have ESPN Plus or some type of subscription like that to hardly ever see any of the games, even games on delay. Uh, so trying to catch your favorite team live, college baseball is extremely difficult. I mean, even if your favorite team is ranked, you're hardly ever going to be on TV. You can probably count on one hand how many times in a season Georgia is on SEC Network. That's not to mention ESPN. It's certainly not a network station like ABC. Just a few times a season on SEC network, which is going to require a specific uh TV package for you to watch that. And this is a two-sided coin. College baseball isn't as popular as some other sports, so it isn't televised as much. But it isn't as popular partially because it isn't televised as much. So these are some struggles that college baseball is facing that are kind of styming its growth. So going forward this season, the way that I would say that college baseball can improve its popularity is going to be increasing the pace of play, speeding things up, cutting down on reviews, and definitely trying to make baseball more accessible for the fan. Now, getting into this season, there are some numbers about the SEC I want to point out. There are multiple polls for college baseball, but if you look at baseball America, three of the top five teams in their poll are from the SEC. Six of the top 10 are SEC teams, and 11 of the top 25 are um all from the SEC. And that's with good reason. Uh SEC teams have been dominant really in college baseball over the last 20 years. 11 of the last 17 seasons, an SEC team has won the national championship. An SEC team has won six national championships in a row. Now, those have been a wide array of teams. You've had LSU, you've had uh Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Ole Miss, Mississippi State. But a team from the SEC has won six national championships in a row and 11 out of 17. In five of those 17 series, both teams were from the SEC. So it's hard to get much more dominant than that. However, it's more than just the national championship game. Since 2008, the SEC has had at least two teams in the College World Series all but one year. Since 2015, the conference has had at least three teams in the College World Series eight out of ten times. So when you're putting that big a percentage of the field from one conference and earning spots in the College World Series, that goes to show that the teams in that league are playing at an extremely high level. So starting in 2017, we'll just start from there. Uh 2017, there were three team SEC teams in the College World Series. 2018, there were three. 2019, there were four. 2021, there was three. Obviously, we had the COVID-canceled season in 2020. 2022, there were four SEC teams in the College World Series. 2023, there were three. 2024, there were four. And in 2025, there were two. That is a truly remarkable run by teams from the SEC in college baseball. There's one team that has not really been much of a part of that run, and that has been Georgia. Georgia's only trip to the College World Series during that time was 2008, where the Dogs lost to Fresno State in the national championship game. Georgia has had many good seasons in the last several years, but even though they have been a top eight regional seed in the tournament a few times and hosted regionals, they have only made it to the second round once. In 2018, Georgia lost to Duke at home twice in one day to be eliminated from the tournament in Athens. In 2019, they lost to Florida State twice. 2020, Georgia had a top five team that was 15-3 until COVID canceled the season. That was a team that I got to wonder, especially with the pitching Georgia had that year, whether that could have been a College World Series, maybe even national championship team. We'll never know. 2021, down year for Georgia. 2022, Georgia made the tournament, eliminated in the first round. 2023 had another down year, missed the tournament. Head coach Scott Strickland was fired after that season. 2024, Georgia brings in Wes Johnson from LSU as their new head coach, gets a top seed, gets through to the second round, uh, and hosts NC State, and they lose that series in the second round. 2025 got a top seed again and lost at home in the first round and are eliminated. So the thing to wonder is will Georgia finally get past this first, second round problem this season. Baseball America ranks Georgia as the number six team in the country. Other ranking systems have them in lower spots. So Wes Johnson has the best record of any Georgia head coach through his first two seasons. He's done a fantastic job. Georgia's roster this year is mainly older guys. I talked about this with Indiana and football. That seems to be the way that the sport is moving now, particularly with the transfer portal and the amount of money that these guys are making from the day they sign as freshmen. It makes more sense and you have more success signing proven older players with experience rather than trying to build your team through freshman recruiting for guys who you're going to have to pay. You don't know what kind of player they're going to turn out to be, and they very well may transfer the very next season. So Georgia and Wes Johnson look like they're kind of trying to build their team through the transfer portal. Brought in a lot of guys from other teams, some of them are smaller schools, but who have had great success. So I'm not even going to try to guess what Georgia's success is going to be this year. We're just going to have to look at the team as they go forward. I I don't know what Georgia's going to be. I don't think anybody really knows what Georgia or any team is going to be with the way that the transfer portal is. I expect Georgia to have a very good season. I I would expect Georgia to have a similar season to what they've had several of the past few years. However, again, the question is: can Georgia get the pitching that they have lacked at times, which that's supposed to be Wes Johnson's specialty? I mean, we're talking about Paul Skins at LSU. Wes Johnson was pitching coach at LSU. Can he duplicate that? Obviously, you're probably never going to get a guy like Paul Skins, but can you get the type of pitching that you had at LSU minus a phenom like that? Georgia's pitching has been a little disappointing the last two years. They've kind of been carried by offense. You had the Charlie Condon year, a lot of home runs from a lot of these teams. And then Georgia also at times has failed to have timely hitting. So we're going to see can Georgia get hot at the right time? It's great to be good in March. It's great to be good in April. How are you at SEC tournament time? How are you at the NCAA tournament? It's not good enough to, you know, win 40 games because you played so well the first few months of the season. You have to play well at the right time. And and possibly no other sport illustrates the importance of getting hot at the right time more than baseball. So transitioning to the Atlanta Braves. Got some Atlanta Braves news this week. They were betting that those two guys were going to be able to hold up through a whole season and not get injured. They were also betting that Spencer Strider was going to come back quickly and that he was going to return to form despite having multiple injuries over the last few years. They also were taking quite a gamble that Chris Sale would stay healthy and that Spencer Schwellenbach would continue his great success from his rookie season. Well, pretty much none of that happened. Ronaldo Lopez was injured very early in the season, lost for the year. Grant Holmes got injured and was out for a significant portion of the season. Chris Sale had a great year and largely stayed healthy other than a freak rib injury diving for a ball, which was one of the best games I've ever watched from a pitcher and a great play, but cost him several weeks. Spencer Swellenbach got hurt severely. Spencer Strider never really got back to where he was pre-injury. You also lost AJ Smith's chauver for the season after he was looking really good, like somebody you needed to have in your starting rotation. So the Braves did not prepare last season and it came back to haunt them. It really derailed the season, the amount of injuries they had. And to some extent, there's nothing you can do about that, but you have to prepare. And so going into this offseason, the belief was that the Braves would really pursue a high quality starter. They have failed to sign one. Whether they have tried to sign them or not is not really important. They haven't signed one. They did get Robert Suarez in the bullpen. However, the news this week, both Spencer Schwellenbach and relief pitcher Joe Jimenez, who was hurt all last season, will both start the season on the 60-day injury list. Oh, and Hasan Kim, who the Braves signed, brought back to play shortstop, slipped on the ice, and will be out for much of the season. So the Braves have to find a starting pitcher. Every team goes through a lot of pitchers right now. Pitching injuries, I don't think we've ever seen pitching injuries at the clip that we're seeing them now, as the Dodgers last season. I mean, have basically the whole pitching staff out at one point. The Braves went through how many different starting pitchers last year? Uh I I not a single one of the starters made it through the whole season. Uh every single starter was injured. Like I said, guys you brought up to be starters to replace those starters got injured. You have to have a plan for that. And the Braves, the Braves didn't do it last year. They haven't done it now. They seem to refuse to do it. The Braves operate this team like they are hoping everything they did in 2021 will happen again every single season. So all the low-dollar moves that you make uh that people scratch their heads at. The Braves hope for another Eddie Rosario, another Jorge Soler. Uh you know, they're hoping these guys that they sign, where people don't really get why they're being signed for and you're getting them for peanuts, they keep hoping that's going to happen again. They keep hoping they're gonna have rookie starting pitchers like uh Ian Anderson came up so huge in the playoffs. You're just that's not going to happen usually. You're not going to have guys be able to just fill these gaps and you just bargain hunt at the deadline and piece a team together and win a World Series. That's not a sustainable way to build your team. So people are going to get hurt. Your pitchers, the Braves pitchers, have injury histories. These are not guys who have stayed healthy their whole careers. Uh Spencer Strider has a lot of injuries. Chris Sale has had a lot of injuries. Now Spencer Schrillenbach has had some injuries. AJ Smith Schauer is a very serious injury. But this is just the reality of pitching in 2026. You have to go get a starting pitcher. You cannot keep gambling on uh low-dollar relief pitchers becoming star starting pitchers, rookie starting pitchers, uh, or or very young starting pitchers being able to put in a lot of innings for you, and you can't keep relying on guys who have injury histories. So I'm obviously not saying to cut bait with Spencer Strider or anything like that. That's not at all what I mean. But what I mean is the Braves need to go make a move. You need to solidify that starting rotation. You need to get more guys who can put in innings. You need to get somebody as well who you can put in triple A and bring up and know he's going to throw some innings when someone gets hurt. It's kind of the situation you had with Bryce Elder last year, and uh a lot of Braves fans cannot stand Bryce Elder, and I understand he's been very mercurial, very up and down. However, you do have to have somebody like that in triple A who will be able to come up and pitch when you inevitably have injuries. So this offseason looks a lot like last offseason. And yes, the Braves went and signed Suarez, but beyond that, this offseason has not been much of an improvement over the previous offseason, particularly now that Hasan Kim has a significant injury. So if the Braves have to limp through this season, it's probably gonna look a lot like last season where the Braves limped through the season. Uh, you'd like to think that that's gonna turn around and that the The Braves can't possibly have as many injuries this year as they had last year, but you can't bank on that. So here's hoping the Braves go out and make a move to getting a starting pitcher, and hopefully they'll be able to avoid any other serious injuries, and we'll get a rebound season. Guys will get back to form this season. So that's all that we have today on the first version of the video podcast. So now you all could see me make lots of mistakes on here. Let me know your thoughts on college baseball. Who's your college baseball favorite team? Do you like watching college baseball? Do you listen on the radio to college baseball? What do you think the sport could do better, if anything, to improve its viewership? And what do you think about the Braves? What do the Braves need to do to take a step forward this season? So if you enjoyed the podcast, please just like, subscribe, share it with your friends, and hope you'll tune in next time.