The 2020 NCAA Division I baseball season, play of

college baseball College baseball is baseball that is played on the intercollegiate level at institutions of higher education. In comparison to football and basketball, college competition in the United States plays a smaller role in developing professional pl ...

in the United States organized by the

National Collegiate Athletic Association The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a nonprofit organization that regulates student athletics among about 1,100 schools in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. It also organizes the athletic programs of colleges an ...

(NCAA) at the Division I level, began on February 14, 2020. On March 12, it was announced that the 2020 NCAA tournament would be canceled due to the

coronavirus pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identified ...

. The decision whether to continue with an abbreviated season was left to individual schools and conferences.

Realignment

Akron Akron () is the fifth-largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Summit County. It is located on the western edge of the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau, about south of downtown Cleveland. As of the 2020 Census, the city prop ...

restarted its program within the

Mid-American Conference The Mid-American Conference (MAC) is a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I collegiate athletic conference with a membership base in the Great Lakes region that stretches from Western New York to Illinois. Nine of the twel ...

. Akron previously dropped baseball after the 2015 season. *

Savannah State ) , established = , closed = , type = Public historically black university , parent = University System of Georgia , academic_affiliation = Space-grant , endowment ...

moved all sports to

NCAA Division II NCAA Division II (D-II) is an intermediate-level division of competition in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). It offers an alternative to both the larger and better-funded Division I and to the scholarship-free environmen ...

, departing the

Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference The Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) is a collegiate athletic conference whose full members are historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the Southeastern and the Mid-Atlantic United States. It participates in the National C ...

and returning to its former home of the

Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference The Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SIAC) is a college athletic conference affiliated with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) at the Division II level. Formed in 1913, it consists mostly of historically black co ...

. * Boise State restarted its program within the

Mountain West Conference The Mountain West Conference (MW) is one of the collegiate athletic conferences affiliated with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) (formerly I-A). The MW officially began operations o ...

, but dropped it again in July due to a reduction in the athletic department's budget. Boise State previously dropped baseball after the 1980 season. * Merrimack upgraded all sports, including baseball, to

NCAA Division I NCAA Division I (D-I) is the highest level of College athletics, intercollegiate athletics sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the United States, which accepts players globally. D-I schools include the major ...

from NCAA Division II, joining the

Northeast Conference The Northeast Conference (NEC) is a collegiate athletic conference whose schools are members of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Teams in the NEC compete in Division I for all sports; football competes in the Division I Foo ...

Format changes

*The MEAC dissolved its divisions.

Ballpark changes

* The 2020 season was to be the first for

UConn The University of Connecticut (UConn) is a public land-grant research university in Storrs, Connecticut, a village in the town of Mansfield. The primary 4,400-acre (17.8 km2) campus is in Storrs, approximately a half hour's drive from Ha ...

Elliot Ballpark Elliot Ballpark is a baseball stadium on the campus of the University of Connecticut (UConn) in Storrs, Connecticut, United States. It is the home field of the UConn Huskies baseball team of NCAA Division I's Big East Conference. The stadium is ...

, replacing J. O. Christian Field. The team was originally scheduled to play its first game there on March 29 against Seton Hall. *

Oklahoma State Oklahoma (; Choctaw: ; chr, ᎣᎧᎳᎰᎹ, ''Okalahoma'' ) is a state in the South Central region of the United States, bordered by Texas on the south and west, Kansas on the north, Missouri on the northeast, Arkansas on the east, New ...

originally planned to inaugurate

O'Brate Stadium O'Brate Stadium is a baseball park in Stillwater, Oklahoma. The home field of the Oklahoma State University Cowboys college baseball team, it is named after Cecil O'Brate. It was scheduled to host its first game on March 20, 2020 against TCU. F ...

on March 20, 2020, replacing

Allie P. Reynolds Stadium Allie P. Reynolds Stadium is a former baseball park in Stillwater, Oklahoma. The home field of the Oklahoma State University Cowboys college baseball team, it was named after former OSU and New York Yankees baseball great Allie Reynolds. History ...

after the first 14 home games of the 2020 season. The first scheduled game at the new ballpark was against the TCU Horned Frogs. Oklahoma State's season was canceled on March 13. * The 2020 season was the last for

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...

McKethan Stadium Alfred A. McKethan Stadium at Perry Field was the college baseball stadium of the University of Florida, serving as the home field for the Florida Gators baseball team until being replaced by Florida Ballpark in 2020. McKethan Stadium was locat ...

, before the season was canceled on March 17. The team's last game at the venue was on March 10, a loss against the rival Florida State Seminoles. * The 2020 season was expected to be the last that

Marshall Marshall may refer to: Places Australia * Marshall, Victoria, a suburb of Geelong, Victoria Canada * Marshall, Saskatchewan * The Marshall, a mountain in British Columbia Liberia * Marshall, Liberia Marshall Islands * Marshall Islands, an i ...

would play off-campus. The Thundering Herd scheduled most of its 2020 home games at

Kennedy Center Field Kennedy Center Field is a community baseball field at the Kennedy Center YMCA recreation camp on West Virginia Route 2 about north of Huntington, West Virginia. The field is used by the Marshall University baseball team. The field had almost no pro ...

, part of a

YMCA YMCA, sometimes regionally called the Y, is a worldwide youth organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, with more than 64 million beneficiaries in 120 countries. It was founded on 6 June 1844 by George Williams in London, originally ...

recreation camp about 7 miles from its

Huntington, West Virginia Huntington is a city in Cabell and Wayne counties in the U.S. state of West Virginia. It is the county seat of Cabell County, and the largest city in the Huntington–Ashland metropolitan area, sometimes referred to as the Tri-State Area. A h ...

campus; the remainder were at

Appalachian Power Park GoMart Ballpark is the current home field for the Charleston Dirty Birds, a baseball team in the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball. It also has been used by the baseball programs of West Virginia University, Marshall University, and t ...

Charleston, West Virginia Charleston is the capital and List of cities in West Virginia, most populous city of West Virginia. Located at the confluence of the Elk River (West Virginia), Elk and Kanawha River, Kanawha rivers, the city had a population of 48,864 at the 20 ...

, more than 50 miles from campus. Ground was broken on a new on-campus ballpark in October 2019, and the new facility is scheduled to open for 2021.

Season outlook

Conference standings

Aborted conference tournaments

The below conferences would have ended their

regular season In an organized sports league, a typical season is the portion of one year in which regulated games of the sport are in session: for example, in Major League Baseball the season lasts approximately from the last week of March to the last week of Se ...

s with a

single-elimination tournament A single-elimination, knockout, or sudden death tournament is a type of elimination tournament where the loser of each match-up is immediately eliminated from the tournament. Each winner will play another in the next round, until the final matc ...

or a

double-elimination tournament A double-elimination tournament is a type of elimination tournament competition in which a participant ceases to be eligible to win the tournament's championship upon having lost ''two'' games or matches. It stands in contrast to a single-elimina ...

; all were cancelled when the NCAA ended the spring sports season on March 12.

College World Series

The 2020 College World Series was scheduled to start on June 12 in

Omaha, Nebraska Omaha ( ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Nebraska and the county seat of Douglas County. Omaha is in the Midwestern United States on the Missouri River, about north of the mouth of the Platte River. The nation's 39th-largest cit ...

, but was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic and the NCAA prematurely ending spring sports for the 2019-2020 academic year.

Coaching changes

This table lists programs that changed head coaches at any point from the first day of the 2020 season until the day before the first day of the 2021 season.

References

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