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Mazey's Mountaineers Getting Hot at Right Time
May 16, 2016 01:20 PM | Baseball
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - West Virginia ran its season-high winning streak to nine games with a 6-1 victory over William & Mary on what turned out to be a very cold mid-May Sunday afternoon in Morgantown.
Actually, the thermometer was lower for Sunday’s season finale against the Tribe than it was back on March 11 when West Virginia opened the home season against Old Dominion.
“May 15 in Morgantown, West Virginia, here we come baby!” West Virginia coach Randy Mazey joked afterward.
Indeed, it may have been a little chilly outside, but Mazey’s streaking Mountaineer baseball team is getting hot at the right time.
Since April 23, following a 12-6 loss at Oklahoma that dropped West Virginia’s overall record to 19-18, the Mountaineers have won 12 out of their last 13 games with one week remaining in the regular season.
West Virginia is now one-half game behind third-place TCU in the Big 12 standings at 11-9 and the Mountaineers’ 31 wins are two shy of the 33 Mazey’s first WVU team put up in 2013.
This is certainly the right time to get hot, but are the Mountaineers running out of time?
Prior to Sunday’s win over William & Mary, West Virginia’s RPI was an elevated 88 according to the NCAA.com’s website; the website Warren Nolan.com has West Virginia a little higher at No. 85 with one non-conference game left at Pitt on Tuesday night and then a three-game Big 12 series at Texas Tech, ranked No. 5 in this week’s Baseball America Top 25.
Therefore, every single game left on West Virginia’s schedule is important to getting its RPI in a much better location before the NCAA Tournament selection committee goes to work.
In 2014, the Mountaineers, despite a 28-26 overall record, thought they might have been high enough with an RPI of 40. They were not.
It was the same deal back in 2003 when West Virginia won 36 of 55 games and had an RPI of 36. Once again it was not good enough.
“That RPI number is almost more important to me than my wedding anniversary sometimes,” Mazey joked. “That’s what dictates whether you’re in or not.”
Men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins knows the RPI like the back of his hand, and he makes sure all of his players understand where the team is at all times. Huggins says he does this so his guys have all of the information they need and won’t come back to him later and say, ‘If only I knew.’”
Mazey takes a little bit of a different approach with his guys.
“You can’t ignore it, but you can’t focus on it either,” he said. “If you focus on it then the at-bats aren’t going to be as good and the team is not going to play as good. But you can’t ignore it either, and that’s the reason why we’ve got to play hard every day because of the results. I think they understand the importance of what we have coming up, and they know where we are right now.”
Where the team is at right now is staring at a steep uphill climb in order to get on the bubble. That means Tuesday night’s game at Pitt, now 25-23 after losing three straight at Miami, almost has to be treated like a conference game (You can follow Tuesday’s Pitt game right here on Watch ESPN).
The Panthers have an RPI hovering right around 60, according to Warren Nolan.com, so beating the Panthers is not the magic bullet West Virginia needs to improve its postseason chances.
Catcher Ivan Vera is one of the freshman standouts for the 31-19 Mountaineers this season, the River Rock, Texas resident leading the team with a .402 batting average heading into the final week of the regular season (All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo).
But losing to a lower-division ACC team such as Pitt won’t help the cause, plus, it would kill the momentum the team is gaining heading into the final weekend of the regular season.
“Our guys have really stepped up against good teams lately,” Mazey, now in his fourth season at WVU, pointed out. “We have six wins in a row against Power 5 conference teams and our guys like playing against guys like that. I like coaching against teams like that. You guys (the media) like watching games like that. The fans come out for games like that. The atmosphere for games like that is really, really good, and kids respond to atmospheres.
“(The Pitt game) going to be a big one, so we’ve got to go up there and win that game and then get on a plane and go down to Texas and make a run at this thing.”
Texas Tech is the one team left on the schedule in a position to get West Virginia on much firmer ground. The Red Raiders (38-13, 17-4) have already clinched the outright regular season league championship, so Tech is playing for a high NCAA Tournament seeding right now.
West Virginia is playing for the opportunity to extend its week beyond the conference tournament - something no Mountaineer team has done since 1996. What makes this team so unique is the number of freshmen Mazey is using in his starting lineup right now.
In fact, when Mazey made wholesale changes in the seventh inning of Friday afternoon’s game against William & Mary with his team trailing by seven runs, the bench came through with an improbable 8-7 win in 10 innings.
“Most times when seven subs go in they’re not as good as the guys that are in the game, but that’s the sign of a good team when you can do that,” he said. “You’ve got to give credit to those guys who came in there. A lot of them were everyday players in this program and now they’re not.”
Mazey said he is beginning to see from this year’s team a lot of the same qualities that some of the better teams he’s been around possessed at Clemson, Georgia, Tennessee, East Carolina and TCU.
“You watch us take batting practice and guys are diving all over the field, sliding into bases, working hard, working on their bunting and they’re kind of fun to watch,” he said. “These are young kids that play hard and I think they understand that there is a direct correlation between playing hard and playing good.”
However, in baseball, playing good and maintaining momentum can end with the next good pitcher a team faces. Mazey says the teams with momentum at least have a fighting chance teams running great arms out on the mound.
“If you don’t have momentum going in to face a good pitcher you’ve got zero chance,” he said. “If you’ve got some momentum you’ve got about a 50-50 chance, probably.
“And we’ve got some right now. Our kids feel good about themselves. We feel good about them. I think some of our pitchers have thrown as good as they have all year and we’ve pretty much settled on a lineup right now,” he continued. “As I’ve said before, we’re a northern program with six freshmen in the lineup with guys playing multiple positions so it just takes a while. It took us a while to figure it out, and I think we’re playing as good as we can right now.”
But is time running out on the 2016 season, or, can West Virginia get an extension?
That’s a question the Mountaineers are going to learn the answer to pretty soon.
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