BLOOMINGTON – Jeff Mercer and Denton Sagerman spend a lot of time talking scheduling. Lately, those conversations have taken on a new tone.

Sagerman, IU baseball’s director of player development and operations, manages the Hoosiers’ schedule. It’s his job to piece together a season tough enough in the nonconference to give Indiana the RPI opportunities it needs to build an NCAA tournament resume, but not so difficult it breaks the season before it even reaches league play.

This spring, Indiana managed nonconference games either on the road or at neutral sites against (among others) Duke, Coastal Carolina, Dallas Baptist, Alabama, Arizona and Baylor. The Hoosiers split a home-and-home with Indiana State and even made a midweek trip to Vanderbilt, all of which ultimately provided them enough lift to get off the bubble and into the NCAA tournament, where they won their opening game before eventually being eliminated from the Knoxville regional last weekend.

For the program carrying the Big Ten’s banner higher than any other in the past decade-plus, that scheduling formula has been refined through years of trial and error. It’s about to get blown up.

“That has been the No. 1 topic of our discussion the last several months,” Mercer told IndyStar. “What is the correct tempo for the season?”

That tempo is in for a major disruption next year, when the Big Ten welcomes four West Coast schools into the fold. At a macro level, USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington enhance an already robust Big Ten brand, but sport by sport, their arrival should change the conference’s competitive profile. Dramatically, in some cases, few if any more so than baseball.

Big Ten investment in baseball paying off

When the NCAA tournament field dropped last month and Indiana, a baseball team beset by injuries during key portions of the season but surging to end it, made it in, the Hoosiers’ inclusion offered a sort of validation.

Of IU’s own resilience, in refusing to be dragged under by those injuries and winning six of its last seven league series on its way to the tournament. But also of the Big Ten, a conference normally treated as a mid-major in college baseball but this spring turned into something more competitive.

Though none of the conference’s three entrants (Nebraska and Illinois the other two) advanced out of the regional round, 2024 felt like a potential corner-turning moment for a league that’s poured significant time and money into being better at baseball. Now, with four West Coast teams inbound, one of the traditional baseball power conferences dissolving and media revenues expanding once again, Big Ten baseball faces a fascinating future.

Which begs an equally fascinating question: What does that mean for Indiana?

By nearly any measure, the Hoosiers have carried the standard for Big Ten baseball’s rise in the past 15 years. In that time, IU has made nine NCAA tournament appearances, won six combined conference regular-season and tournament titles, hosted two regionals and won a game in the College World Series. Only once in those nine tournament appearances did the Hoosiers fail to win a game.

Indiana has managed that sustained success across three coaching tenures, the department and its boosters willing to underwrite significant investment in the sport to carry it forward.

By no means is this department alone in baseball investment. Across the Big Ten, substantially widened revenue streams have allowed member schools to significantly renovate or completely rebuild facilities, work more aggressively in staffing and retention, and invest in cutting-edge technologies and resources.

There’s an argument the conference has never placed so much emphasis on baseball — certainly not in the post-war era — and it shows.

The season now ended pays testament to that. Every one of the existing Big Ten’s 13 teams (Wisconsin doesn’t sponsor varsity baseball) finished inside the RPI top 150, a remarkable floor compared to where the conference was even five years ago. Nine Big Ten teams finished inside the top 100.

Consider the league in basketball terms. What holds back mid-major conferences in March? Chiefly, the lack of opportunities for quality wins. In the past, Big Ten schedules might include series that could only be swept to even make par from an RPI perspective, but this year, the conference was so strong top to bottom it finished fourth nationally by Selection Monday in league-wide RPI.

Now come reinforcements: Four West Coast schools with, between them, more than 80 NCAA tournament appearances, and 28 trips to the College World Series.

“Obviously, from the RPI standpoint, that helps,” Mercer said. “You’re bringing in schools that, over a five- or a 10-year window, on average are going to be top-50 to top-75 RPIs and at times top 25. They raise the overall profile of the league.”

USC, albeit in faded glory, is one of the most successful college baseball teams ever. Oregon has reached nine of the past 15 NCAA tournaments. Washington was in Omaha as recently as 2018. And UCLA hosts a remarkable list of alumni, one including but not limited to Chris Chambliss, Gerrit Cole, Brandon Crawford, Troy Glaus, Eric Karros, Chase Utley and, of course, Jackie Robinson.

The four schools arrive to a conference flush with money, at the vanguard of a revenue-sharing agreement that — if schools so choose — would allow anyone to fund baseball’s scholarship pool beyond the tradition 11.7 partials.

And they’ll be welcomed by a commissioner who once played college baseball, spent a substantial portion of his career working for Major League Baseball and has been not just sympathetic but also receptive to coaches’ ideas for escalating the Big Ten’s wider competitiveness.

Obstacles like the conference’s long-standing over-sign rules could be eased in the coming years. Video replay at the highest standard in the sport is now mandated leaguewide, rather than on a school-by-school basis. And that financial and infrastructural investment seen early on at schools like IU and Purdue hasn’t slowed down. Penn State and Rutgers are the latest current Big Ten members to pour millions into their facilities.

“As that announcement came with those schools, the order was, ‘We want to compete in baseball,’” Mercer said. “All of those pieces that have kind of been in the way of Big Ten baseball, the administration has removed some of those impediments.”

West Coast meets Midwest in new baseball power conference

What all this means for the conference, it can mean for Indiana more specifically. Crucially, that could move the Hoosiers from strength to strength.

A department that’s built its new stadium, added enhancements like refreshed player facilities and a video scoreboard, and well more than doubled its baseball-specific operating expenses across the past 12 years, clearly believes its success in the sport can last.

The rising tide that should lift all boats will undeniably make Mercer’s job tougher. But it will also widen avenues to that success.

West Coast representation opens new recruiting opportunities. Greater brand value should see more Big Ten baseball on television. The Big Ten’s robust media and rights revenues will mean the league’s schools should be able to fully fund revenue sharing opportunities for athletes, and those agreed-upon changes to scholarship limits could benefit equivalency sports like baseball most directly.

A lot of that — for a program with eight regional appearances in 11 years and top-40 recruiting classes across the previous three seasons — is quantifiable in some way.

What isn’t is the culture shift that will come with the advent of West Coast baseball to the Big Ten.

“A lot of the culture of the Midwest is through power arms and power bats. Those things are good and we’ve had a lot of success with that philosophy,” Mercer said. “But when you go and play those schools, it’s always interesting, the opponent you play, if your team is intelligent, you’ll take on the best attributes of some of the best teams that you play.”

West Coast teams, Mercer said, layer in precision pitching, situational baseball and stout defense. Adding programs with that capacity raises the bar for the rest of the conference.

And as that tide washes over the league, it is prepared to ride the wave into shore.

The Big Ten will transition to a 30-game (10-series) league schedule next year. A conference building onto of one of its most competitive seasons in recent memory should only become more so, at the moment when it decides to play itself more often.

What typically holds up conferences like the ACC and SEC is that through the collective strength of the league, few if any teams ever become a genuine drag on anyone’s RPI. Only one team from either of those two conferences, Missouri, finished last season outside the RPI top 100. When nearly nothing is a bad loss, there are RPI-boosting wins all over your schedule, and the rich stay that way.

Will the Big Ten reach SEC levels of national relevance? Probably not. Proposals like a later season start date — which would allow Big Ten schools more time outside both for practices and early season games — could shift the landscape somewhat. But the sport’s power base will always find shelter in the South and West.

Except now, the West Coast’s most powerful conference is gone. Four of the teams that made it so are bound for the Big Ten. There’s a power vacuum in college baseball the Big Ten can (and, at least to some extent, will) fill.

Years of program building have put Indiana in position to capitalize on that shift, entrench itself as one of the league’s best teams and ride rising momentum in the sport. For Mercer and his team, the coming years should be fascinating.

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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Big Ten baseball about to level up with Pac-12 teams joining in 2025