Aaron Fitt of Baseball America has an interesting statistic based article about the eight schools playing in the College World Series.
Among the things he says, teams playing in their first College World Series typically don’t fare well:
Teams making their first CWS appearances seldom fare well in Omaha. Since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1999, eight teams have made their CWS debuts, including Southern Mississippi and Virginia last year. All of them lost their first game, and none won more than two games. But of the eight teams in Omaha this year, just Arizona State (which was in Omaha last year) and Florida State (which made the trip in 2008) have players on the current roster with CWS experience, so maybe the Omaha experience factor will be negated somewhat. Either that or the Sun Devils and Seminoles will have a decided edge over the rest of the field.
We’ll see if TCU ace Matt Purke can reverse the trend on Saturday when the Horned Frogs take on Florida State.