Baseball: Psomas on the Brink of Greatness
February 11, 2004 09:53 AM | General
February 11, 2004
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| Psomas |
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- Temperatures are nearing single digits. The pavement's black pigment has been replaced with snow or that gray mucky slush combination. A blade of green grass would be an epic discovery nowadays.
But alas, baseball season for the Mountaineers is right around the corner. That's right, baseball.
And perhaps no West Virginia hardball player is more ready for this season to start than junior Grant Psomas. That's pronounced "Puh-som-us."
The "P" is NOT silent. Neither is his bat.
The shortstop from nearby Carnegie, Pa., was a key part of a WVU offensive attack that ranked fifth in the nation in team batting average last season as he bashed nine home runs and 35 RBI with 44 runs scored.
Still, while his numbers were certainly satisfactory for a shortstop who commonly hit in the seventh or eighth slots in the order, they vaguely compared to those of his teammates in 2003.
Lee Fritz batted .407, Jarod Rine batted .403 and won the BIG EAST co-player of the year award, Kurtis Clinton led the league with 13 home runs, Jake Serfass batted .357 with a .656 slugging percentage, and Tim McCabe hit .344 with 11 bombs, just to name a few.
All this is more than enough incentive for the sweet-swinging Psomas to put together a breakout season of his own in 2004.
"I'm hoping I can put together a season like those guys did last year," says the modest and soft-spoken Psomas. "I really hope all our players can do that this year. It would be a big help if different guys in the lineup stepped up for us."
Psomas is one of the many leaders on a West Virginia squad that feels they have some unfinished business to take care of after losing in the BIG EAST Championships last season and not receiving a bid to the NCAA tournament, despite the team's high RPI ranking of 39.
Don't look to Psomas to make excuses, though.
"I wouldn't say we got ripped off, we should've taken care of it ourselves," he explains. "You can't leave it in the hands of the committee to get in. We should have won the BIG EAST last year and we would have been in. And that's our goal for this season."
Those losses to Notre Dame and Rutgers in the conference tournament last season have obviously stuck in the minds of Psomas and his teammates. But instead of dwelling on it, Psomas decided to let his bat once again do the talking, this time in the Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League for his hometown Pittsburgh Pandas.
He finished the summer at fourth in the league with a batting average of .375 while knocking in 20 RBI, earning him first-team all-GLSCL honors and eventually second-team Summer All-America honors by Baseball America.
"I just felt real comfortable at the plate this summer," he says. "I think that it really helped me for this season and I feel prepared and better then I ever have before going into a baseball season."
While his comfort zone at the plate is more than sufficient, the story has been slightly different in the field for Psomas. Last season, he had the most errors on the squad with 22, including a few key mishaps that may have cost the Mountaineers a couple games.
Psomas is quite aware of the problem, and has worked arduously in the offseason to improve his fielding skills and be an all-around player.
"Grant has made great strides in the offseason to improve his fielding, and so far, he looks great at shortstop this year," says coach Greg Van Zant. "We are confident in his abilities in the field and we think he's going to have a great season."
Psomas adds, "I've taken a lot of ground balls in the summer and the fall. I just cannot get nervous and I have to calm down. I need to concentrate more and focus on making the play."
According to him, the errors must be mental because he is playing in a position that's quite familiar to him, one he has been playing since he was five years old.
An important an influential figure to Psomas since that young age and throughout his life has been his father, Steve Psomas, who was Grant's coach all the way up to high school.
Steve Psomas always instilled the values of hard work and perseverance to his son, and even gave him an intriguing nickname since the day he was born. The elder Psomas dubbed his son, "Gungie", after the character in the old Rudyard Kipling poem, "Gunga Din," which was later turned into a feature film in the late 1930's.
The character was a Three Musketeers-type hero, who joined his fellow comrades to ward off evil and fight like warriors.
While Grant himself has little knowledge of the character, a little Gunga Din-attitude just might be the right recipe for the Mountaineers this season.
If Psomas and his teammates can take a warrior-esque approach at the plate and come together as a team, reaching the NCAA tournament will certainly be more of a reality than a fairy tale.
