Top 9 Online College Baseball Resources: Boyd's World

We're taking a look at my top 9 favorite (in no particular order) online resources for College Baseball information.

BoydsWorld.com used to earn my uncontested my vote as the #1 online resource for College Baseball.

It's still a great website, but Boyd Nation has moved on to other (more profitable) interests and now sells his incredibly detailed stats and analysis of college baseball players and trends to those with the big bucks to pay for it, like major league baseball and scouting groups.

He used to write a weekly column called Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha, for which devoted college baseball fans would eagerly wait and then argue about for days (or weeks . . . or years). He no longer writes that column, but the archives are available on the website and worth your while to read. All of them. Trust me.

Here's an example from a 2005 column on The Racial Composition of College Baseball:

Here then, are the numbers for the 8,591 players checked:

• White 90.4%
• Black 5.3%
• Hispanic 3.5%
• Asian 0.3%
• Pacific Islander 0.4%

The number for black participation is skewed in a way that needs to be mentioned. If the two HBCU [historical black colleges and universities] conferences are removed from the numbers, that number drops to 2.7%, which is much closer to the generally perceived number.

"Asian", in the college game, means something different than in the professional sense. While almost all Major Leaguers of Asian descent are from the Far East, in college the numbers of players of Far Eastern and Middle Eastern descent are roughly equal, with a couple of Indian ancestry thrown into the mix.

The Pacific Islanders are highly concentrated in the two Hawaii schools, of course, but are present in reasonable amounts in many of the Western schools. This is in contrast to MLB, where as far as I know at this time, the presence of Pacific Islanders depends entirely on whether Shane Komine is with the A's or in AAA.

Be sure to read the rest of that article and check out the other archived articles.

Even without the weekly Breadcrumbs, what makes the site still worth frequent visits during the season are the sabermetric rankings and lists that he updates frequently (some of them daily), including his Pseudo-RPI, Strength of Schedule, Iterative Strength Ratings (ISR), Individual Leader Board, and the Pitch Count Watch.

All of these are great for knowing just how Mizzou and Mizzou players rank among other teams and players in D-1 baseball.

Also be sure to spend some time rummaging around in The Filing Cabinet.

And check out the Team Schedule Calendars. When he updates them for 2011, you can download MU's entire schedule to your Outlook calendar or Apple Calendar.

Like d1baseball.com, boydsworld.com is a plain vanilla site as far as graphics and flashy stuff (an intentional choice by Boyd Nation). But it is a treasure trove of information.