Hi Notes: Summer Ball, Stipends, First Pitch, and Prophets of Doom

♦ Mizzou Baseball Sets Date for First Pitch Dinner (mutigers.com)

The Mizzou baseball program has announced that its ninth annual First Pitch Dinner will be held on Saturday, Feb. 9, at 7 p.m. inside the Holiday Inn Executive Center in Columbia. The 7 p.m. start gives Tiger fans enough time to get to Mizzou's men's basketball game with Ole Miss at noon inside Mizzou Arena. The event will run until 9:30 p.m. and feature dinner and drinks for Mizzou baseball fans and supporters. More details will follow on the ninth annual First Pitch Dinner.

NCAA

♦ He says he wants to keep it simple, but nothing's ever simple when the NCAA gets involved:  NCAA president Mark Emmert hopes to unveil new stipend plan in April (CBS Sports)

Emmert says there's more interest in a need-based plan, and that his NCAA task force continues to vet concerns from the NCAA membership.

Among the plan's options, according to Emmert:

Athletes applying for money through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
Giving universities or conferences discretion over how funds are allocated.
Calculating stipend payments based on family contributions...

SUMMER BALL

♦ Summer Baseball Insider is a new website debuting this week, focusing on the collegiate summer leagues.  It's a combined effort from the folks at Pointstreak and Andrew Hartwell, who used to blog at CollegeSummerBall.net.

It looks like a great idea to me.  News about the summer leagues has always been spotty and difficult to find.  Hopefully this new website will be a great resource for keeping track of our Tigers in Summer Ball.

Summer Baseball Insider is an innovative, free to use, specialty web portal designed to aggregate and deliver comprehensive Summer Collegiate Baseball news and content to every level of industry stakeholders. Driven by a dynamic, eager group of industry experts and utilizing the best technology available, Summer Baseball Insider will become, and position itself as the long-tail of Summer Collegiate Baseball. Through phased in advancements and technological enhancements, Summer Baseball Insider will evolve into the multimedia standard for Summer Collegiate Baseball available on an array of platforms and devices.

EMBRACE THE UNDERDOG

♦ PowerMizzou.com takes a dim view of Mizzou Baseball's future in the SEC in their Questions for 2013

Baseball is a different story. The SEC has 14 teams and virtually all of them are perennial NCAA Tournament teams. The league had four teams finish last season in the top ten and nine in the top 26 of the national polls. If Missouri entered the deep end of the pool in SEC football, they're jumping off the platform in baseball. The Tigers won the Big 12 tournament last year, but finished just 33-28 overall. Compared to most SEC facilities, Taylor Stadium looks like a high school practice park. Tim Jamieson probably has the most daunting task of any Tiger coach entering the new league.

Get used to it. The next 43 days will likely be full of apocalyptic predictions for Mizzou Baseball.