Baseball's "Sweet 16"

Starting this spring, the First Region baseball champion will advance to the state tournament at Applebee's Park in Lexington.

The Kentucky High School Athletic Association has been looking for ways to expand the tournament, but two aspects of the plan raise some questions.

For starters, the regional tournament format will change dramatically. The KHSAA wants to play first-round games on Memorial Day, a trend the First Region started in the late 1990s that has become standard operating procedure across the state, then play the semifinals on Thursday and the championship game early the following week.

That works to the advantage of a team that one or two outstanding pitchers and little depth behind them. Frankly, most baseball people I know like the three-games-in-as-many-days format, for it rewards pitching depth and requires coaches to exercise some strategy in juggling with their starting rotation.

Also, the state tournament would begin on Monday and go on all week, and that could be disastrous if Lexington gets two or three days of rain in that time. Applebee's Park's primary tenant is the Lexington Legends, a Houston Astros' Low-Class A farm club, and several days of rain could cause a conflict with the Legends' South Atlantic League schedule.

The rain could also compress the format into a three-or-four-day schedule. And frankly, most high school pitching staffs don't have the depth to survive that kind of grind.

It seems the move stems from a desire to give just as many baseball teams the "state tournament experience" that basketball and softball regional champions enjoy.

That's fine and admirable, but how feasible is it? Basketball can be played every day without affecting the integrity of the game. Softball pitchers face much less risk than their baseball counterparts, which are limited by pitching rules designed to reduce wear and tear on arms and lessen the potential for injuries.

As a high-ranking KHSAA official once told me, comparing different sports are like "apples and oranges." Unfortunately, the KHSAA has gone away from that approach in recent years, allowing more than 85 percent of football teams into the playoffs with a six-class, four-teams-per-district format and now changing the way it does baseball's postseason.

It's all part of the "make everybody happy" approach. Well, as a sports purist of sorts, it sure smacks of pandering.

Indications are that this spring is an experiment of sorts ... well, we will see how it works out.