I just went around the interior of the ball park. The field looks great. After heavy use during the summer the grass seems to have recovered. The lights are all up. One panel of the new scoreboard has been installed. Progress!

The lights for the soccer field are also up! Great times.

Sounds great. Maybe Rocko is the visionary leader who can actually get something done with baseball.

It just figures that the lights are finally in the first year I decide to really stop going to games (not like how I "retired" from this message board). Still will follow how they're doing. Maybe they'll win the conference this year too just to spite me. Hope they do.

I'll tell you what college baseball I was interested in seeing this year-I briefly considered seeing a game at Sonoma State before they shutter their program. Then I saw some pictures of their ballpark. Some nice redwoods in the background but otherwise just a very basic field you might see in a local park- except they weirdly have some box seats from the Milwaukee Brewers' old stadium.

You know what really is terrible for the Seawolves though ? They have a brand-new coach in a lame-duck season.

SSU would be playing Jessup U (now in D-II). I followed the Warriors a bit last year when former Aggie James Williams III played there. I have to say Jessup baseball players are uniquely fortunate. Imagine a road...err...plane trip to Hawaii every season. This is because their new conference includes Hawaii-Hilo, Hawaii Pacific, and Chaminade.

Is the field even playable today?

I was downtown for an appointment this morning and saw a big group of athletic looking kids walking together. They were all wearing Gonzaga gear, so it must be their baseball team. They ended up going into the Hallmark Inn so that must be where they are staying

The field looks cool under the lights. Just checked an inning on ESPN+

I'm deeply disappointed in the new scoreboard though. I found it impossible to read. The really important information a baseball scoreboard should present would be the score, balls-strikes-outs, and who's at bat. All of this information is provided - but it's small. Is a photo of the player more important? I'd argue NOPE. In addition you have to view the scoreboard through the netting which further makes the small text difficult to read. I hope this format is re-evaluated because as it stands the new scoreboard is LESS USEFUL than the old one. And that's a bad thing.

Wow...Stingers completely missing in action!

That was a pretty big win as Sac State had been playing well. They swept Abilene Christian (another good team) over the weekend in TX; UCD lost 3 of 4 in Abilene last year.

I like that the Aggies got opportumities for a lot of different players, but I don't completely like how they won it. What I mean is that weekend starter Noel Valdez threw the 1st 4 innings, while Sac threw a bunch of mostly little-used/ineffective relief pitchers. Then the Aggies used some of their big relief arms (Hippensteel, R. Barnes, Lerma) to close it out. Meek was the only little-used pitcher to appear in the game for UCD. Not exactly a level playing field if Davis is using their A and B pitchers and the other team is throwing their D/D- staff. It was like Sac viewed it as a practice game, while UCD's objective was to crush the Hornets at all costs.

If I remember correctly the last time these two teams played a weekend series was in 2011, which also makes it the last time they played all of their best against each other. Bragging rights are pretty meaningless when both teams don't field their best players. And the Causeway Cup is all about bragging rights, isn't it ?

Now Valdez is probably the best pitcher with a career 4-10 won-loss record in Aggie baseball history, but I don't like that they threw him in a mid-week game ahead of a conference series in which he'll probably start, even if it was for just 60 pitches. Coaches that do this kind of thing may use the reasoning that it was the pitcher's day to throw between starts anyway, but there's a pretty significant difference between throwing a bullpen session and facing opposing hitters. There's a greater chance of injury doing the latter-and then what happens to the weekend rotation ?

Oh well, I hate mid-week games anyway. They cut into the student-athletes' study time, and are less
convenient for fans to attend.