Natural Born Hitter
May 08, 2009 12:05 PM | General
May 8, 2009
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| Jedd Gyorko |
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – It seems like the more recognition and awards Jedd Gyorko receives, the fewer good pitches the poor guy sees to hit. Right now fastballs to Gyorko are about as frequent as sunshine is in the Northeast.
“It can be a little frustrating but you can’t let that get to your head,” Gyorko admitted earlier this week. “If you start thinking about that then everything else will go wrong. I just go out there and try and control what I can as far as putting good swings on pitches I see and that’s all I can really do.”
Despite getting few good pitches to hit, Gyorko is still one of the top hitters in the country. He leads the Big East with 24 doubles and his .395 batting average is fifth-best in the conference. Last year as a freshman, Gyorko batted .409 to earn freshman All-America honors.
And later this summer, Gyorko will play in the Cape Cod League against college baseball’s best players.
“It’s an honor to go up there and play and it’s the best league in college baseball,” he said. “It’s going to be a challenge, but I’m looking forward to seeing where I rank among the nation’s best.”
Because Gyorko is such a threat in the middle of West Virginia’s lineup, players hitting behind him have benefited greatly. Last year, Vince Belnome led the team with 66 RBI, and in 45 games this season Belnome has a conference-high 67 runs driven in. The junior is just 14 RBI shy of All-American Mark Landers’ school-record 81 RBI produced in 1994.
Belnome is a first-rate college hitter, but he will be the first to admit that he has benefited greatly by teams pitching around Gyorko - already walked nine times more this season than he was all of last year.
“That has been a big thing for me because I have never really been a patient hitter in the past,” Gyorko said. “I see pitches that I like and I try to hit them, but I have to take my walks when I can and bank on our other players like Vinny to drive me in.”
When Gyorko is on, he is driving the ball to the right-centerfield gaps. It is that extra millisecond it takes to hit the ball to right that makes him such an outstanding hitter.
“When my timing is right my most power is to right center so that’s where I try to put most balls,” he explained. “When I get out on my front foot and I get my weight transferred, I have a tendency to pull the ball and that leads me to maybe roll it over and ground out more times.”
Like all good hitters, Gyorko sits on the fastball and adjusts off that.
“You see a guy that’s predominantly off-speed and you can sit on a couple of off-speed pitches but for the most part I’m pretty much looking fastball,” he said.
“The thing I try to do is to be short and really quick to the ball,” he added. “I have a really long, high follow through so I can hit through the ball and generate some backspin.”
West Virginia (31-14, 13-8) still has one of the strongest hitting teams in the country with a conference-leading .356 batting average. The Mountaineers are first in the Big East in runs scored, doubles, total bases, slugging percentage, on base percentage, runs batted in and home runs.
But critics point to a less-than-grueling non-conference schedule that has seen the Mountaineers play games against some teams that have struggled mightily this season. They say that faster outfielders will run down some of those fly balls that drop in for doubles, and better infielders will be able to handle bunts that go into the book as hits.
Gyorko simply shrugs.
“We don’t really think about that. We don’t do the scheduling. We’ve played good teams and we’ve fared pretty well against them so you can’t say we haven’t played anybody,” he explained. “We went down and (defeated) Tennessee and we beat Kentucky in a good game. It’s all D-I, everybody is good, so you’ve just got to go out and play.”
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| Jedd Gyorko has a conference-best 24 doubles to go with a .395 batting average.
WVU Photographic Services photo |
The Mountaineers’ toughest stretch of the season came two weeks ago with back-to-back series losses at Notre Dame and South Florida. After pounding the Irish 19-3 in game one, Notre Dame swept a doubleheader on Saturday by scores of 8-6 and 3-0.
The following weekend, league-leading South Florida swept WVU in Tampa by scores of 8-3, 11-2 and 9-6.
“We played pretty well against Notre Dame and we hit a lot of balls hard - they were just right at people,” Gyorko said. “That’s baseball, what are you going to do? We went down to South Florida and the hitters just didn’t respond there like we usually do and we ran into some good pitching. You have to give them all the credit. We went down there and they just beat us all three games.”
Those losses to Notre Dame and South Florida made last weekend’s three-game series against 11th-place Rutgers so critical. WVU claimed game one, 13-1, but lost Saturday’s game, 12-7. On Sunday, the grounds crew turned out to be just as important as Billy Gross tossing a complete game in West Virginia’s 9-3 victory. Both teams battled poor weather to get the game in and as a result, West Virginia is now two games ahead of fifth-place Cincinnati and Notre Dame in the win column.
“That was huge just to get back on the right track and win a series,” Gyorko said. “Before the last two road trips we didn’t lose a single series and then we pretty much got pounded in two in a row, so to come back and win a series gives us a lot of confidence. And more importantly, it gives us two wins ahead of the fifth place teams. We want to get that home game in the conference tournament.”
Although likely out of contention for the regular season title, West Virginia still has an excellent opportunity to secure a top-four finish during the regular season, making it the home team in the opening round of the conference tournament.
A big obstacle is in front of West Virginia this weekend when 26-23 Cincinnati comes to town. The Bearcats hammered the Mountaineers all three games last year in the Queen City, and also beat them 11-5 in the opening round of the 2008 Big East Tournament.
“We went up there for three games and they pretty much just handed it to us and then we went to the Big East Tournament and it was the same thing,” Gyorko said. “They got us four times last year but this year is a new year.”
First pitch for Saturday’s doubleheader is 3 p.m. The series will conclude with a 1 p.m. game on Sunday. WAJR will carry all three games live in Morgantown and on the Internet through MSNsportsNET.com.
