Taking a quick break from basketball this week, I have decided to briefly focus on my personal favorite sport: baseball. While I am partial to my beloved Chicago Cubs, I see no harm in honoring the 2012 college baseball standouts, based on collegebaseballdaily.com and their employers and contributors, editor Brian Foley and senior writers Kat Cornetta and William Knox.

These top athletes play various positions and come from all over the country, however, most are obviously from the South or West Coast. Like the basketball and football players we study so closely, they also have been playing for years on high school teams as well as travel teams, so they have been covering the bases of the sport for years—pun intended.

To name a few of these all-stars, top-ranked Mike Appel of Stanford University is a standout pitcher for the Cardinal, finishing with a 5.92 ERA over 38 innings. Twelfth-ranked Richie Shaffer of Clemson University, for another, started all 63 of the Tigers’ games in 2011 and ended his season with a .315 average, not to mention a team-leading 63 homeruns and 55 RBIs. And LSU’s Kevin Gaudman is pegged at number twenty-seven for his outstanding freshman year in 2011 that included a 5-6 season and a 3.41 going along with it.

Unfortunately, there is not enough room to create a special shout-out to all 100 top-ranked athletes, but it is clear by the examples listed that they all possess major talent and will be watched closely by baseball fans all over the nation and possibly some Major League prospects. I look forward to the upcoming se But the best of luck goes out to them, and a few will certainly be recognized in the College Baseball World Series next summer.

Photo courtesy of yspspartans.com and the NCAA