West Ignored in NCAA Regional Site Selections : College baseball: Long Beach State’s proposal gets inadvertently lost in the stapler.

The NCAA announced the eight regional sites for the 48-team Division I baseball tournament Monday, and for the first time since the regional format was adopted in 1975, the West was shut out.

No school felt more left out than Long Beach State, which submitted a bid to conduct a regional at refurbished Blair Field, then learned after the selections were announced that its proposal had not even been considered by the Division I baseball committee because of an NCAA administrative error.

Long Beach, however, would probably have been considered a longshot. The continuing shift in power and influence in college baseball was evident in the selections, which include five Southern, two Midwestern and one Southwestern school as regional hosts.

The regional sites and dates: Atlantic I at Miami May 27-30; Atlantic II at Tallahassee, Fla., May 26-29; East at Clemson, S.C., May 26-29; Mideast at Knoxville, Tenn., May 26-29; South at Baton Rouge, La., May 26-29; Central at Austin, Tex., May 27-30; Midwest I at Stillwater, Okla., May 27-30, and Midwest II at Wichita, Kan., May 27-30.

Participants in the tournament, which ends with the eight-team College World Series in Omaha June 3-12, will be announced next Monday.

Dave Keilitz, chairman of the baseball committee, said the criteria for selecting regional sites include the quality of the facility, revenue potential, attendance history and potential, geographic location and whether the host school is likely to gain a playoff berth.

Keilitz said 21 schools submitted regional bids, among them Stanford, Arizona State, Fresno State, San Diego State and Nevada.

Keilitz and the other members of the baseball committee were unaware Long Beach State had submitted a bid. Dennis Poppe, the NCAA’s director of championships, said someone in the NCAA office inadvertently attached the school’s proposal to another bid, so it was never reviewed by the committee, an error that was discovered after a reporter asked Keilitz during a conference call why Long Beach’s bid had fallen short.

“It’s the first time I can remember something like that happening,” Poppe said.

“We called (Long Beach State) and told them of this situation. There was no assurance that they would have been selected, but I’m sure they would have been given consideration.”

Long Beach Coach Dave Snow said: “As coaches, we get a working manual of a thousand rules that we have to follow in our programs . . . and then something of this magnitude comes along that we can be a part of and something gets stapled. It just baffles me.”

Bob Milano, baseball coach at California and the West’s lone representative on the nine-member baseball committee, said he was shocked by the snubbing of the West, which is generally regarded as the one of the strongest regions.

“West Coast baseball is getting shunned,” Milano said. “We as an area need to get support from the conference offices to fight what has become a battle of respectability.”