We are watching college baseball change -- and not for the better

Few observers, if any, would argue that of all the so-called major college sports, baseball has remained the least affected by money and greed. It has remained closest to the college ideal, meaning the least professional in nature. College baseball has had the most level playing field.

Baseball is the one sport in which small market teams such as Mississippi State and Ole Miss could win back-to-back national championships. It is the one sport in which a so-called mid-major school like Coastal Carolina could recruit and develop a team that could win a national championship as it did in 2016 – or in which another Sun Belt team, Southern Miss, could host back-to-back NCAA Super Regionals as it did in 2022-23.

But we are watching the nature of college baseball change before our eyes.

This is not a good thing.

You don’t have to take it from me. Gary Gilmore, the retiring coach who led Coastal Carolina to that national championship, sounded an alarm over the weekend after his team lost to Clemson in the finals of an NCAA Regional. Gilmore should be considered an expert on the matter. He coached his teams to 1,369 victories, which computes to an average of more than 40 wins a season for 34 seasons.

Gilmore was asked about the state of college baseball, and he didn’t mince words.

“I’ll use this analogy, and this is what’s wrong,” Gilmore said. “If Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NFL had a system where everyone was a free agent every year, do you realize what chaos there would be? It would go away. You wouldn’t have those three sports. If you did, in baseball it would be the Yankees, the Red Sox, the Dodgers, Texas, and the rest of the teams couldn’t compete because they would spend whatever amount of money they needed to do it. And that’s what’s going on right now. I mean, there’s not a level playing field. It’s just ridiculous to me.”

“There has to be a better way,” Gilmore continued. “It’s not just who can raise the most money and give it away. There has to be a better way because, like I said, professional sports would go in the toilet in a hurry if we used this system. I mean, me as a college coach, this is what I have to deal with. You can sign your returning players to a scholarship, which binds you to them, but they can come out in July and go, ‘I’m gonna go in the portal. I’m up at the Cape (League), and someone’s gonna give me a big NIL deal. You were held accountable, coach. You had to honor that scholarship you gave me, but now I’m going to go in the portal and leave you hanging.’ That’s a messed-up system. I hope somebody fixes it. I’m gonna be honest with you, that part I’m going to enjoy not having to mess with.”

We’ve seen this play out — almost precisely as Gilmore states — here in Mississippi. The prime example: In July of 2022, Hurston Waldrep transferred from Southern Miss to Florida during the last week of the transfer portal period. Scott Berry, then the USM head coach, was left high and dry with no time to replace Waldrep by with another pitcher in the portal. Berry thought he had his pitching rotation in place. He thought wrong.

So what happened? Well, Waldrep helped pitch Florida into the College World Series championship series. Southern Miss, on the other hand, came up one victory short of making it to Omaha. You could make a case that Florida would not have gotten to Omaha without Waldrep, and that he would have been the difference maker that put Southern Miss in the College World Series for only the second time in school history.

In his first season as USM head coach in a proverbial rebuilding year, Christian Ostrander replaced six everyday starters, an All American starting pitcher and an All American closer, and still won 43 games and a conference tournament championship and made it to a regional final. There’s no time to celebrate said accomplishments because Ostrander must now stave off poachers who would love nothing better than to steal some of the talent with offers of high-dollar NIL packages.

Every college athlete is now a free agent every year. Gilmore is right. It would not work in professional sports. It won’t work in college athletics. It is a system that is not sustainable.

Rick Cleveland, a native of Hattiesburg and resident of Jackson, has been Mississippi Today's sports columnist since 2016.