Yes, this is a college football blog but since things are a little slow with the offseason and college baseball is heating up I’m going to provide a college baseball play as well. Please note that I won’t count these results on my tracking page. I am going to keep that page just for college football for the time being.

The College World Series kicks off in Omaha this Saturday with two games. The afternoon game will feature NC State and Stanford and the evening game will be between Vanderbilt and Arizona. The latter matchup is where we have our play.

TD Ameritrade Park replaced historic Rosenblatt Stadium in 2011 as the ballpark for the College World Series. It is a bigger stadium with deep fences that makes it play more like an under stadium. I believe home runs will be a lot tougher to come by in Omaha than they were in the Regionals and Super Regionals. In the most recent college world series (2019), the first 9 games all went under 10.5 runs (when the pitchers were fresh). In fact, Under 10.5 went 12-2 overall in the 2019 college world series.

Vanderbilt has 2-aces to choose from in this game, but I believe they will start Kumar Rocker. He started game one of the Regional and Super Regional, so it would make sense for him to start game one of the college world series as well. He is an electric arm that has put up huge numbers throughout his career and his projected to be a Top 5 MLB draft pick. In 2021 he is 13-3 with a 2.46 ERA, 106 IP, 155 K and a .157 OBA and 0.89 WHIP.

His two postseason starts have been very impressive as well:

6/11 vs ECU: 7.2 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 3 BB, 11 K in a 2-0 win
6/4 vs Presbyterian: 7 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 9 K in a 10-0 win

Arizona is coming into this game with some red hot bats and I think the total might be a little inflated because of the results in the Regionals and Super Regionals. I’m banking on the ballpark and stud opposing pitcher to cool them down a little bit.

I’m not exactly sure who will pitch for Arizona, they may have to mix and match a little bit, but Vanderbilt’s offense has gone under 4.5 runs in 3 of their 4 postseason games. I like this game to go under the 10.5 total.

Official Play – College World Series

Arizona/Vanderbilt Under 10.5 (-113) (DraftKings)
Risking 1.13 Units to win 1.00 Units