(Shotgun Spratling)

Battered Big West Runs Gauntlet

LONG BEACH, Calif. — The Big West is a proud baseball conference, and it is rightfully protective of its rich heritage. As the five BCS conferences pour more and more resources into baseball, the cash-strapped Big West programs are falling farther and farther behind in the facilities arms race, and they receive just a tiny fraction of the television exposure that those “Power Five” conferences enjoy.

Yet every June, some Big West team inevitably puffs out its chest and knocks off a couple of the far richer power-conference teams standing in its path to Omaha. The Big West[…]