The 2022 collegiate baseball season has started off well, and is picking up with the usual upsets.

The season began on February 18, 2022 for all NCAA Division 1 schools. Texas started off ranked at 1, but now Ole Miss has taken their spot due to some schools upsetting Texas. Ole Miss have won four straight series over the past weeks and are on a hot streak. Ole Miss is 13-2 on the season and passed up Texas because Texas just lost a series to an unranked South Carolina.

Vanderbilt is not far behind at No.4 holding the same record as Ole Miss. Vanderbilt are always good and they are “the” school that baseball players dream of going to. Vanderbilt made it to the College World Series finals last year, but fell short to Mississippi State. Mississippi State currently ranks at 23, which is probably due to losing a lot of talent to the draft. One of their best players, Pittsburgh native pitcher Will Bednar, led Mississippi to a championship. He is now on the San Francisco Giants and is starting his MLB career.

A freshman trying to make his name from NC State who goes by Tommy White is off to a very hot start. He has earned the nickname, “Tommy Tanks”, because he has hit a lot of homeruns right out of the gate in the season. He is hitting .431 and a fun fact is that most of his home runs were all hit to dead center, the farthest part of the ballpark. NC State is unranked at this time, but with Tommy and all of the talent on that team I think they can make a serious run for the championship this year. 

I had a nice interview with a couple players from the Charger baseball team about what they think about college baseball. I asked Nate Schmid who his favorite team is this year. He told me that his favorite team is Penn State. I also asked him who he thinks will win this year’s College World Series? He replied saying that he thinks Texas will take the title because they started off strong coming in at number 1.

Another fellow Charger baseball player I interviewed was Mike Lazzaro who has plans to play baseball in college. I asked him if he was excited to play in college next year. He said yes, it will be a new experience. I also asked him why he chose to specifically play where he plans to attend next year. He said that he really liked the coaches, and it’s close to home.

Local team the Pittsburgh Panthers are off to a decent start this season. They are unfortunately unranked at the moment and are battling back and forth for every win. At this team they are hailing in at a 10-8 record.