11.7.
It’s not a nice even number, but it’s one that college baseball teams and coaches know better than the bounces of their infield or the dimensions of their stadium.
Each Division I baseball team is authorized to use a maximum of 11.7 scholarships on 27 scholar athletes. So how do you divvy 11.7 scholarships among 27 athletes? That’s the golden question – and one that may never be answered satisfactorily.
“They should increase it,” said former LSU outfielder Mikie Mahtook. “If you have a team of 35 guys, you’ve got to have more than 11.7 to split.”
The numbers are a result of the 1972 Title IX laws, which give female athletes an equal opportunity to participate in sports.
While women’s sports have steadily risen in the 40-plus years since Title IX went into place – an undeniable positive – some men’s sports foundered.
Baseball is included in that count. Wisconsin scrapped its program entirely, and Cal-Berkeley committed to discarding its program in 2010 before fundraising raised enough to keep it afloat.
“Women didn’t want to kill men’s sports, they just wanted it to be equal,” said former LSU athletic director and baseball coach Skip Bertman. “I think baseball is pretty much a victim of Title IX.”
The NCAA mandates a roster limit for each team, allowing only 35 players.
Just 27 are allowed to receive any sort of scholarship.
“You can’t even cover a full backup spot,” said former LSU first baseman Blake Dean. “You need at least a full 18 scholarships. … You could field two full teams with 18 scholarships. That would be a little more reasonable.”
In addition to numbers restrictions, each player on scholarship is required to receive a minimum 25 percent scholarship.
The entire process is enough to make one’s head spin, especially when considering most of the work is done by one man.
LSU baseball coach Paul Mainieri describes his job as a mix of scouting director, development director, head coach and general manager rolled into one position.
Coaches go armed on recruiting missions with a chart indicating expenses for each scholarship. Scholarships are broken down into tuition, room, board and books.
For an in-state athlete, tuition accounts for 31 percent of the scholarship, room accounts for 34 percent, board accounts for 33 percent and books account for two percent. A full ride for an in-state student costs $18,616 for a full school year.
Tuition costs for out-of-state athletes account for 56 percent of the money allotted for scholarships – about $29,400 per year.
The total for all of these serves as a denominator. Coaches can then offer an athlete a set amount each season to serve as the numerator.
If Mainieri were to offer an out-of-state recruit $15,000 a year, it would count toward roughly 51 percent of a scholarship.
But half a scholarship would be a steep price for Mainieri to pay for one player with the 11.7 limit.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever had a player receive a scholarship in the amount which was commensurate to his value,” Mainieri said. “They’re all underpaid, in other words… It’s sad, really, that college baseball is treated that way.”
How many scholarships a team can dole out is a touchy issue for coaches. The reasoning simmering under the surface serves as the fundamental decision maker – money.
It’s not a problem at LSU, where the thriving baseball program plays in a brand new multimillion dollar facility and generates more than $6 million in revenue for the University and non-revenue generating sports.
But in other schools around the country, programs are regarded as what Mainieri calls a “black hole.”
Many worry that if more scholarships were made available it would create a larger divide between the haves and the have-nots.
Mainieri said ‘roughly half’ of the 296 Division I schools don’t even use their full allotment of scholarships.
“When you’re at a place like LSU and you’re trying to push to get 20 or 25 full scholarships for the baseball team, it’s falling on deaf ears,” Mainieri said. “Half the schools would never vote for that, because all that’s doing is creating a wider gap.”
Even during Mainieri’s 12-year tenure at Notre Dame – one of the more prestigious Division I schools – he wasn’t allowed to use all 11.7 scholarships until his final season.
The decision to use less than the full amount was an institutional one, according to Mainieri.
“The leadership at each institution decides how important college baseball is to them,” Mainieri said. “It sickens me that schools don’t look at our national pastime favorably.”
The likelihood of things changing are slim.
While the scholarship limit of 11.7 has been in place since 1991, the parameters for maximum roster size and minimum scholarship amount for each player were implemented in 2008.
“We’ll have to learn to accept what we have,” Bertman said. “We’ll never get any more. We might get less someday, but we’ll never get any more.”
 
____ Contact Luke Johnson at [email protected]