The Jack N' The Box is more about getting a quick meal than quality. I typically like to get to the ballgame at least half an hour before it starts

If it were more than a college football game during a pandemic I'd say it'd be worth it to have the 3 extra seats just so you can tell people the seats are reserved if they try to sit there. Extra legroom. But in this case , definitely not worth it. There's still the possibility they might not even play.

You copied and re-purposed my UCD baseball 2020 Big West Co-Champions idea LOL.

I own a Chico State football t-shirt that says "undefeated since 1997".

Without fans at the games it may be very hot for the players. It's Las Vegas :(

This leaves a loophole open. What if you said you hate basketball, the Big West, and stared at your phone the whole time ? Then you would be neither a spectator nor a fan, and you could attend. I mean, that defeats the point but it works.

Well, they got a game in, though it got really ugly and they lost 11-1. I was following the game online but stopped when they brought in Ryan Rodriguez to pitch. I mean no disrespect to him or his ability. It's just that he only pitches when the coach has thrown in the towel and needs a mop-up man.

Brett Erwin started and only gave up 1 run, but he was a little wild and hit his pitch count in the 4th inning. Kaden Riccommini (sp ?) had an ugly pitching line (including the loss), but he was really impressive at times. Bailed Erwin out in the 4th but in the 5th gave up a couple of hits followed by a big fly. But then he retired at least the next six in a row before WSU scored again. He was left in there too long.

The Aggies could not buy a hit with runners in scoring position. Their only run scored on a passed ball. Still, Jalen Smith, Michael Campagna, and Colron Evans had good days at the plate.

Vaughn must have read my starting lineup guess and moved people around to make me as wrong as possible:

C:Campagna
1B:Gedestad
2B:Mico
SS:Arenado
3B:Smith
LF:Evans
CF:Morrison
RF:Brandel
DH:O'Boy

No Lara or Iverson in the lineup surprised me. I'd read Iverson had been really impressive in camp.
So did O'Boy at DH hitting 5th.. He must have made amazing progress with the bat because he is not known for his hitting.

The man Campagna replaced at catcher debuted as the DH for Sac State. He went hitless, but so did most of the hornets. I don't plan on sharing Sac State game recaps frequently, just when our old friend Logan Denholm does something noteworthy. He was a very good Aggie. It took a leg injury and a pandemic to get him across the Causeway. Apparently the Hornets are spitting on the travel recommendations and spending their first weekend playing in Phoenix, where they had a wild finish tonight. ASU held a 2-0 lead, and had only allowed 3 hits, but with 1 out in the 9th Sac State's regular catcher hit a grand slam and then the hornets' closer slammed the door. The Sun Devils have to be bewildered as to what happened

I read in the Davis Enterprise they were supposed to visit UOP and Loyola Marymount after the series with the cougars. I believe there might have been a scheduling conflict with Pacific and LA- forget about it. And no resumption of the Northern Colorado series so,

No Lions and Tigers, and Bears...oh my !

And what's funny is in Logan Denholm's bio they mention UCD several times.

It's like they're embarrassed to admit that their pitching coach is a guy who barely pitched at all for their rival. Of course the informed among us fans know that catchers can make excellent pitching coaches too because they work with pitch-framing and game-calling. Apparently La Torre was a good HS pitcher but Peters didn't let him pitch until they had a bunch of injuries in 2006. He pitched more as a blow-out game mop-up guy in the minors than he did in his first 3 years@UCD.

LOL. They should call it the Potatodome. No more ridiculous than the Taco Bell Arena in Boise, which I've visited.

I'm waiting for all but the Idaho game to be cancelled so that the season is a single contest at the Potatodome. They can call it the Mega Bowl, like in the "Semi-Pro" movie.

If basketball has been able to host games with no fans, why couldn't football ? There are more athletes, of course, but you help to mitigate the risk by only allowing a certain number of players into the stadium (say 35 each team) for the first half, and the rest can sit, socially-distanced in lawn chairs at the practice field until halftime, when they can be summoned to take the spots of injured players, but those injured players would have to have already left the stadium. Meanwhile, the injury replacement squad would be limited to say, 15-20 players each team. Whoever's left just stays home.

It's now up on the website. They also added a 3 game (over 2 weeks) home series against San Jose State during what would be their conference bye week. The Pepperdine series is now 4 games. Only out of state trip is Hawaii. It is split evenly with 5 home BWC and 5 on the road but interestingly CSUB and UCSD are both on the road, so there had to be some shifting. UCD usually (in my memory) doesn't play Cal Poly and Irvine at home the same year it hosts Fullerton and UCR.

As to the series structure it is 4 games on the weekend with Saturday double-headers, as Fullertonbaseballfan has indicated.

I like this new structure and hope it sticks. Grouping the games for the week into one series will force teams to avoid abusing their favorite relief arms, whom they know can't go 4 games in a row or twice in the same day without risking severe injury. No throwing starters out on a Tuesday to try to close out games. There's also built-in rest of at least 4 days for everyone after Sunday games are concluded.

If the double-header games are both 7 innings that would be even better. This, and the other changes would seem to level the playing field a bit for UCD. They'll have to come up with a fourth starter but so will all the other teams. Many D-I schools aren't 4 or even 3 strong starters deep, so that Sunday game is a true wild card. That's an extra chance not to get swept. Of course teams don't necessarily have to pitch their weakest starter on Sunday with the DH's.

Also, 7 inning games in doubleheaders would favor the Aggies a bit. Typically their best pitchers are in the rotation already, except for the closer, who is typically the guy who would start if they played 1 more game per weekend series. The rest of the bullpen is an adventure typically. Win or lose, the less they have to go to the bullpen the better. Blowouts will be over more quickly.

Answering my own inquiry from above. Trevor Bauer's collegiate debut was against UC Davis, but it was the previous game. He picked up the save in relief of some bum no one's ever heard of named GERRIT COLE. It's funny when you think about it. In 2009 Cole and Bauer were the Sat. starter and closer, respectively for the Bruins. The Friday starter, Rob Rasmussen, didn't do much in the pros but the guys after him produced two 9 figure free agent contracts!

Perhaps the most impressive thing in this boxscore was the best Aggie pitching performance of the day was from Adam Bennett. He shut down the UCLA bats for 3 inningsso the Aggies could rally and tie it in the 9th. Bennett, like Phil Rasmussen (basketball) before him. was a pitcher who didn't join the baseball team until he was a 5th year senior. Bennett was a water polo player.

I saw that too. His passing was very sad, magnified perhaps because he was from Davis, if memory serves. I do remember the athletics dept didn't find out until pretty late because when I left home that Sunday to go see the game vs Cal State Bakersfield it was still on, but when I arrived at the ballpark the gates were closed, and there weren't any sounds from inside.

There was one detail I wasn't quite clear on (or maybe forgot) and that was whether or not Heinig was a student at the time. He had finished his baseball eligibility in 2010, but that doesn't mean anything-many baseball players are on the 5-year graduation plan. However, it somehow seems more sad if he already had graduatef because he would have also had a job and co-workers missing him too.

There are quite a few coincidences in that box score. Each team had a Bauer and a Quist. Bauer pitched to Bauer and Quist pitched to Quist. Each team also had the son of a major leaguer who bore his. father's name (Eddie Murray and Michael Aldrete)

Too bad Aldrete and UCD didn't work out. He wound up transferring to a JC (where he also pitched successfully) and San Jose Stae, from which he was drafted (Phillies, I think). They had another player-Tyler Bremer-who pitched in a couple games then never again for UCD. He then resurfaced at a bigger program (Baylor, I think) and made it to Triple-A in the Marlins' organization.

I believe Trevor Bauer was a freshman at the time, meaning the Aggies handed him his first career loss. It might have also been his collegiate debut.
I'll have to check into that.

When I look at the 2009 schedule I can see from the quality of the teams they were able to beat (UCLA, Pepperdine, Fresno State) that they had a lot of very talented players but just didn't really come together as a team. Rex Peters and his staff probably shouldn't have put together such an ambitious schedule after the 2008 playoff season knowing they were losing their entire pitching rotation, closer, catcher, and a few other key position players to graduation and the MLB draft.
All the early season beatdown losses probably didn't help the chemistry of a team with so many freshmen.

A couple of interesting updates. The Aggies are hosting Washington State for 4 opening week (2/19-2/21). In a real surprise Pepperdine will be visiting for 3 the weekend after Cal Baptist. It'll be split over just two days (3/12-13).

Update- 2/28-3/1 Portland comes in for 3. I believe that wraps up the first 4 weeks. That also will likely mean the sum total of their non-conference games because they have 40 games against 10 conference teams after that.

I think perhaps they might place barricades or security guards at places around the stadium (don't know how that would look exactly ) to discourage people from gathering to watch the game from outside. I'm sure others have had that idea too, but a gathering is a gathering as far as COVID-19 is concerned. A person walking alone may stand a better chance of not being hassled.

I wonder how Sac State will handle baseball attendance this year. They can block off the entry points to the stands, but people can, and frequently do, park and watch the games from the upper levels of the parking structure for free. If a few people stayed in their cars and treated it like a drive-in movie that would be low-risk. It's more that they stand in groups and yell insults at the outfielders... Maybe they'll just close the garage completely on game days.

We all have our ideas of what seems reasonable attendance-wise, but they can't even let parents in until the county (likely with the ok of the governor) approves expanded gatherings, and that won't happen until COVID-19 numbers look better, and that likely means better than before the holidays, not just better than now.

Expedia is usually the partner on my hotels.com bookings.

I forgot to mention hotels.com is really more something you want to use for short trips and ones you're not 100% sure you're going to take. You might not get the best deal you would've gotten from dealing with the hotels directly but it's a lot easier to back out when your plans change. I haven't really had any complaints about any of the hotels I've stayed at as far as service is concerned. Now, location and other guests are a different story. In El Paso the woman down the hall yelled at her young daughter at several different times during the night and in SD I made the mistake of booking a place right above a Mexican restaurant that had loud music and was full of customers until 2 a.m. The white noise machine in the room helped.

It also depends on your priorities. I tend to want to stay either right near the airport or right near the stadium, if there's a sporting event at night. Booked the Downtown Phoenix Hyatt through Hotels.com ($100/night) about 3 blocks from Chase Field and got to laugh at all those folks (silently) piling on the light rail at 11 pm for 2 hour rides to Mesa so they could save a buck.

that url should be

https://collegebaseballinsider.com/open-dates/2021-open-dates/

I saw the Cal Baptist games too. I think even now UCD is trying to finalize a schedule :

https://collegebaseballinsider.com/open-dates/2021-open-dates/&ved=2ahUKEwjrlfSU-cHuAhXMITQIHUYqBosQFjAAegQIARAB&usg=AOvVaw0TpZUBOhRZaWsMKX97qa8i

Even as of 1/16 they were still looking for games, saying they must be in CA this year. That puts a real limit on the teams they can play on the road, so at least one of those weekends may just stay vacant. Wonder how that will work with Hawaii ? This year would've been UCD's year to visit them. Perhaps they will either make that the 1 exception or the Big West will simply roll out last year's schedule that wasn't played and work in CSUB and UCSD into teams' open weekends + start a week earlier ?

The next time you travel I'd recommend using hotels.com . Free cancellation and good rates. I found a room in SLO in September about a mile from Cal Poly for around $90 (continental breakfast included). Didn't wind up going, but it would have been a good deal had I done so.

Tallest overall team for sure. They had some pretty tall players when I was in school during the D-II era. Janae (sp ?) Henning was kind of like Morgan Bertsch, but less outside shooting. Kelly Ditto was 6'8, and at the time she was taller than the men's tallest player (Jason Cox). Ditto wasn't a starter though. Could block well but not really shoot. Missed seeing Jennifer Gross play by a year, but did see Des Abeyta.