How and Where to Watch College Baseball Online

Carlos Rodon’s slider simultaneously giveth, taketh away.

Collegiate baseball possesses two compelling qualities even for those who, like the author, don’t have a vested interest in a particular school’s success on the field. For one, it offers the opportunity to consume actual baseball at a time when — like all of February and March, for example — at a time when the professional version of the game remains entirely too obscure. For two, it allows one to watch and become acquainted with no fewer than half the players who’ll be selected in the first round of the amateur draft in June.

White Sox left-hander Carlos Rodon, for example, was ranked eighth among all prospects by Kiley McDaniel this morning at our sister site, FanGraphs. Rodon’s repertoire includes a fastball that sits at 92-95 mph and, more impressively, a slider which, by some unusual property, has demonstrated the capacity to repair the ozone. At this time last year, however — months before he was selected third overall by Chicago — Rodon was throwing those sliders for NC State.

“That sounds excellent, but how does one find his or her way to such a game?” is a reasonable question to ask at this juncture — and one I’d like to answer poorly in what follows.

As a resident of a region in which college baseball isn’t widely available — or, at least, not available at the highest level — I’ve been forced to search for either television broadcasts or streaming video. The former is often more expensive than the latter.

If one’s interest is in having access to the greatest number of games for the least amount of money, CBS’s College Sports Live is the best option. It costs just $9.95 per month and is available as an app, as well, for iPad and iPhone and Android devices. As I documented at NotGraphs a couple years ago, I subscribed to an earlier version of this same service called ULive. College Sports Live features three distinct advantages over ULive: a more intuitive layout, accessibility on other devices, and price (ULive was $14.95 per month).

College Sports Live offers live games and on-demand replays.

This past weekend, I used College Sports Live to watch two ranked teams (Rice and Texas) play each other — and was also able to see possible first-round selection, Illinois left-hander Tyler Jay, make a start against Lamar University. While the feeds for both those games were reasonably strong in terms of video quality and camera angle, one is also at the mercy of the particular university’s resources so far as that’s concerned. A Virginia game featuring top collegiate pitcher Nathan Kirby was also available, but the main camera was an elevated, behind-the-plate one that lacked intimacy and provided almost no information regarding Kirby’s pitches.

I note in that review of ULive from three years ago that I chose to watch Stanford and Vanderbilt — and, indeed, the latter of those schools features probably the best team in all of college baseball at the moment. So far as I can tell, however, watching Vanderbilt by way of College Sports Live is impossible now, since the introduction of the SEC Network a couple years ago, the product of a partnership between the conference and ESPN.

WatchESPN’s college baseball content is largely provided by the SEC.

The SEC Network is available by way of most digital cable packages, but seems to require one of the more robust subscription levels from any given provider. To receive the SEC Network at my home would necessitate something called Digital Basic, for example, which costs roughly $95 per month. It does include access via WatchESPN online not only to all the normal programming found on the SEC Network, but also to SEC Network Plus, which offers feeds of games unavailable on the the actual channel. If one really is dedicated to the idea of watching of watching the best college baseball, ignoring the SEC poses some difficulties. Right-hander Walker Buehler, shortstop Dansby Swanson, and other shortstop Alex Bregman, for example, were all featured near the top of Kiley McDaniel’s way-too-early 2015 draft rankings — and all play for SEC schools.

The Stanford-Vanderbilt game would be impossible to watch on College Sports Live in 2015 for another reason: the conference to which the other school belongs also has its own network now. Nor is this unique at this point. In addition to the Pac-12 Network is also the Ivy League and even Southern Conference networks.