The Division II Baseball Committee at its recent meeting recommended modifying the selection criteria for the championship by adding a component of results against opposition with a .650 or better winning percentage.

If approved by the Division II Championships Committee, the modification will be another tool for the committee to consider when selecting teams for at-large berths in the championship.

The committee discussed several variations of opponents’ winning percentage before deciding .650 was the appropriate standard.

“The committee felt it wanted to see another way to judge high-quality wins,” said Jeff Schaly, the committee’s incoming chair and assistant athletics director at Lynn. “We are just adding a new criterion.”

The committee also eliminated the overall Division II won-lost percentage and strength-of-schedule components from the criteria because they closely mirror the in-region results against Division II opponents.

When the committee examined that factor, it found that most teams play about three games per season against out-of-region Division II opponents. Some programs in the South have more because Northern teams travel south for warm-weather games early in the year.

“We felt overall they were duplicate criteria,” Schaly said. “Most of the time when everyone plays a Division II school, it is an in-region game. We looked at the West region, and in the whole region, there were only like one or two total Division II non-region games played the entire season.”