Oregon baseball: Pac-12 finally getting postseason tournament in 2022

Other sports have done this for a long time, and Pac-12 baseball has finally come around and will have an end-of-season conference tournament.

One sport where I have seen this first hand is Oregon softball. Oregon baseball will see this run similarly.

At the end of the year, the top eight teams in the conference standings will participate in a double-elimination tournament with the winner earning an automatic bid into the NCAA Tournament.

The Pac-12 made the announcement on Wednesday in conjunction with the City of Scottsdale and The Arizona Sports & Entertainment Commission. The Tournament will be played at the spring training home of the San Francisco Giants. The conference has an agreement with Scottsdale through the 2024 season.

I am happy to see that the Conference of Champions has finally decided to go in this direction with baseball. After teams face each other home and away for the season they will have an opportunity to be crowned with a conference title using more than just their record. It will have to be earned at the end of the regular season, which is the way it should be.

The Pac-12 is one of the most successful when it comes to the sport of baseball. The Pac-12 has won 29 of the 74 baseball championships all time. In 2020, six Pac-12 teams made it into the NCAA Tournament. The thought that an underdog seven or eight-seeded team could knock off the No. 1 seed adds some extra drama to the start of the baseball postseason.

Currently, the USC Trojans lead the Pac-12 with 12 NCAA titles in baseball. Arizona State has five. The Pac-12 has had a representative in all but seven NCAA College World Series fields since the championship started back in 1947.

The inaugural Pac-12 Championship will be held at Scottsdale Stadium from May 22-29, 2022.