Rangers host 2nd annual college tournament

ARLINGTON -- The college baseball season will kick off at the Rangers’ Globe Life Field once again in 2022 with the State Farm College Baseball Showdown from February 18-20.

Tickets for the second annual State Farm College Baseball Showdown at Globe Life Field in Arlington went on sale on Friday, Jan. 14. Single day tickets and weekend passes can be purchased at texasrangers.com/collegebaseball. Single day tickets are good for all three games on that particular day, while the weekend pass is good for all nine games throughout the tournament.

All games of the 2022 tournament will be streamed live by FloSports.

“Anytime you get an opportunity to get baseball guys and the baseball community together, starting with college baseball, and in pro baseball and the scouting community, you look forward to it,” said Texas Tech head coach Tim Tadlock. “Most of us hadn't been around each other a whole lot over the winter. And I think anytime you have some type of tournament setting, with good competition, we all look forward to seeing people who we haven't seen in a long time. And I think we all look forward to seeing how our teams are going to respond in this type of environment.”

This year’s tournament features teams from four of the Power Five conferences: Kansas State University, the University of Oklahoma and Texas Tech University from the Big 12, the University of Arizona from the Pac-12, Auburn University from the SEC and the University of Michigan from the Big 10.

Sean Decker, the president of REV Entertainment, who puts on the event, said the main goal was to get in the top-tier programs in college baseball every season.

Texas Tech is the only team that participated in the inaugural tournament in 2021 that will return this year after going 0-3 against SEC schools in last season’s Showdown. The inaugural State Farm College Baseball Showdown in 2021 also featured the College World Series champion Mississippi State Bulldogs.

“This is a first class event,” Tadlock said of his team’s decision to return to the tournament. “The teams in the event last year played at a really high level coming out of the gate. There was a lot of feedback with one-on-one matchups and what you need to do within your roster for guys to compete at a high level each day. It was really cool to see everybody in the same venue and to see the kids compete with what they had at that time.”

Decker said it’s important for the Rangers and Globe Life Field to show a commitment to growing the game of baseball at the college level throughout the state of Texas and get more in-state colleges in the stadium throughout the college baseball season.

With TCU right down the road in Fort Worth and UT-Arlington in Globe Life Field’s backyard, Decker and REV Entertainment have had continued conversations of growing this event and others in the coming years.

“This is something we're super passionate about,” Decker said. “We love the college game. Our goal in future years is to continue to add to this. In an ideal world we'd like to play 30 or more games in the month of February and the first week of March, so we want to play a ton of games. We want to continue to bring some of the best programs in the country.”