No Pre-Season AA picks for MWC by Louisville Slugger

How Does the MWC Compare With Other Western Mid-Majors

One of the beauties of college baseball is the playoff system. That ends all arguments. The mid-major is always hopeful that one of its teams can make it through to the promised land and maybe the championship. Fresno State comes to mind. Being a San Jose State fan I still cheered their accomplishment. Each year a team or two makes it to the CWS. So why am I writing this? Well, it is always fun for me to compare some of the mid major conferences with the others. Now, I'm getting down to it. In this case I'll talk about outstanding players in western conferences with emphasis on the MWC.

Where do I get my information? In this case it's Collegiate Baseball. The January 6th edition had their annual college (all levels I might add) and high school pre-season AA selections. I drop everything when this shows up in my mail. Yes, dear readers, it's a real newspaper. The AA list that they have is the Louisville Slugger D1 All-Americans and has three teams. It's dominated, as you might expect, by the big boys. Teams from the Pac-12, SEC, ACC, et al had the most players. No surprise. All you have to do is look at the list of their recruits each year and most of these kids pan out.

So what's the head count? Last season the MWC had three that I recall with two from New Mexico and one from Fresno State. The Mountain West ain't so lucky this time as no one made the cut. Two non-football conferences that are both strong in baseball had a number of entries. Both the WCC and the Big West have good to great players and can play with anyone. Since I've been following the WAC and the WCC, it's been pretty much the same story. The WAC usually had one or two and the WCC had a few more and the Big West did land office business. Just look at the pre-season rankings; Fullerton State is #1 and has two on the first team and both are pitchers. Not a bad place to be. The list I made below is pretty easy to understand and "the rest" is all the other mid-major teams with AA picks such as Jacksonville State. Sadly, the WAC had no picks but there are at least two teams that might have an AA by season's end.

How this will all pan out at the end of the season is beyond me but remember Kris Bryant was a second team pick last year and ended up being the national player of the year and for good reason. By the way, he is the number two prospect in the Cubs organization. Expect to see him at Wrigley next year from the very beginning. What does that team have to lose? What I'm saying here is that there will be change by season's end.

What does this all say? Well, it could be a bit of a down year for the MWC in baseball as it seems to me that basketball is this conference's strength. I'm always beating the drum for whatever conference the SJS Spartans are in and the Mountain West has at least three teams that could make some noise on the national level. To do that, they must have players that deliver AA numbers by the end of the year. Let's hope so.

MWC none
WAC none
WCC 3
Big West 9
the rest 21