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WVU's Zarbnisky is Mr. Versatility
May 22, 2017 12:17 PM | Baseball
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - West Virginia’s Braden Zarbnisky is one of the most versatile players in college baseball today.
As a pitcher, he ranks sixth in the Big 12 this week with six saves. As a hitter, he sometimes bats third in a Mountaineer lineup that ranks third in the conference in team batting with a .282 average; Zarbnisky, although not having enough at bats to qualify among the league's leaders, is hitting at a .333 clip in 93 plate opportunities.
As a base runner, he’s swiped a perfect 11 bases in 11 attempts, tied for 10th best in the conference. He’s also spelled Brandon White in center field when West Virginia coach Randy Mazey wants to give his freshman outfielder a rest.
Zarbnisky, from Marietta, Georgia, is a throwback to another era in baseball when brains were valued as much a brawn.
At the plate, this guy is more Willie Monsconi with a cue stick than Willie McCovey with a baseball bat. On the bases he’s a cross between Billy Hamilton and Jimmy Piersall, and on the mound, he possesses some of Greg Maddux’s movement and guile.
Put that all together and you’ve got one of the most interesting players in the college game this side of Louisville, Kentucky, where Brendan McKay plays.
“There are not many two-way guys in the nation doing what he’s doing,” Mazey admitted.
Or, better yet, doing it the way Zarbnisky does it.
Of the five coveted tools professional scouts seek, Zarbnisky might have two: arm strength and speed, and both are probably borderline at best.
But the dude has a baseball mind like no other and he uses it to his advantage whenever he steps on the diamond. With some of the dumb stuff you often see in the game these days, you sometimes wonder if the players know that the White House is actually white.
Not Zarbnisky.
He knows how to handle the bat at the plate. He knows how to run the bases. He understands angles and positioning in the field, and he knows how to get hitters out when he’s on the mound.
Sabermetrics have become the rage now with computer-generated statistics determining a player’s value in much greater detail than the statistics we grew up with such as batting average, home runs, RBI, earned run average, wins and so forth.
Sabermetrics is what dictates some of those bizarre shifts you sometimes see with the third baseman playing shortstop and the rest of the infield positioned to the left of second base. It makes you wonder what Pete Rose, Rod Carew or Tony Gwynn would have done against some of these alignments, by the way.
West Virginia is beginning to dabble in Sabermetrics a little bit and a metric the WVU coaches will cite is Zarbnisky’s personal run value to the team because of his ability to hit for average, get on base with walks, sacrifice runners into scoring position and steal bases.
Simply stated, if Zarbnisky occupied all nine hitting positions in the lineup and the opposing team was required to retire him over a 27-out contest, his current production would equate into nine runs per game.
That far exceeds the next closest player on the team with a run-production value of 6 ½ per game.
Then, if you combined his run production with his earned run average on the mound, currently at 2.67 heading into the Big 12 Tournament, that means Zarbnisky himself would win baseball games 9-2.
“Right now I’d say he’s been our most valuable player,” Mazey said.
Admittedly, some of these Sabermetric stats are way over the common fan’s head, but even the naked eye can see the problems Zarbnisky creates with a bat resting on his left shoulder, a baseball in his right hand, or his feet stepping off the first base bag.
Zarbnisky almost singlehandedly helped West Virginia defeat third-ranked Texas Tech without the benefit of the baseball being hit out of the infield.
With the Mountaineers trailing 2-1 in the bottom of the fifth and having little success against Red Raiders ace Steven Gingery, Zarbnisky led off the inning with a little slap hit over the pitcher’s head that Gingery knocked down.
A hustling Zarbnisky forced Gingery to throw high of first base, enabling Zarbnisky to take second on the error. Then, during the very next at bat, Zarbnisky took off early for third, causing a startled Gingery to step off the rubber and throw high to third base, allowing him to jog home to tie the game at two.
Later that inning, WVU scored the go-ahead run to produce its best victory of the season.
In a recent win against Gardner-Webb, Zarbnisky was the game’s most impactful player despite not getting a single hit. He walked three times, scored twice and sacrificed two runners that eventually scored in a 15-5 victory.
There are times when Zarbnisky is hitting in the bottom of the eighth inning and then must hustle down to the bullpen to get his arm loose to close the game in the ninth.
“There was a game when Zarb was hitting and then was going to go out and pitch the ninth inning and I’m thinking to myself, ‘I hope he just strikes out on three pitches so he can go out and get ready to pitch,’” WVU hitting coach Steve Sabins laughed.
But that’s not how Zarbnisky thinks.
“Hell, he pitches better when he’s playing and then he pitches,” pitching coach Derek Matlock said.
“Do you remember back in the day when a pitcher would get on base and someone would run a jacket out to him?” Mazey asked. “That’s not Zarb. ‘Don’t give me a jacket, I’m getting ready to steal second.’”
Matlock is the one who found Zarbnisky pitching for Team Georgia, but it was Mazey who noticed his value as a hitter.
Mazey liked what he saw in Zarbnisky and his teammate Cole Austin and signed both of them. Then, when he saw them play later in the summer, Mazey noticed how well Zarbnisky handled himself at the plate.
“He had two strikes on him and he slaps the ball into the ground and ran like hell to first base,” Mazey recalled. “I’m thinking, ‘Dang, that might be good for us if he’s good enough to do that.’”
“Randy is the one who saw his value as an offensive player,” Matlock added. “He said after we signed him that he was going to hit. I said, ‘Hit? I thought he was a pitcher?’ I’ll be damned if he doesn’t come in and do all that crazy stuff he does.”
When Zarbnisky arrived in the fall last year as a freshman, Mazey let him slap hit and run the bases the way he did in high school and it literally drove his teammates nuts.
“He stole like 15 bases in the fall against our team doing stuff like that,” Mazey said.
Even opposing teams are sometimes skeptical when they see him walk up to the plate and take his first swing, which, according to Sabins, is “probably the worst mechanical swing on the team.”
Then, when the wiry 6-foot-3-inch, 185-pounder takes to the mound he doesn’t look too intimidating until batters step into the box and see everything he throws moves - and not just moves, but moves late, which is the best movement of all.
He can also reach back and throw a 92 mph fastball by them as well.
“Another team coming in here looking at his numbers and sees what he’s hitting with five wins and six saves, and then they watch him swing the bat they’re like, ‘This guy?’” Mazey said.
Mazey, who coaches third base when the Mountaineers are hitting, had to bite his lip to keep from laughing out loud during a game against Oklahoma when the Sooners couldn’t figure out how to defend Zarbnisky.
Oklahoma had a freshman shortstop out in the field and the third baseman was helping position him for each batter.
“When Zarb came up, Oklahoma’s third baseman said, ‘Heads up, this guy will slap it.’ He was playing straight up and Zarb slaps one in between them during his first at bat. The second at bat, the third baseman said, ‘Move over and play in the six hole.’ Zarb then slapped one up the middle," Mazey said.
“The next time up he chops one in front of him so the last time the shortstop said, ‘Where the (bleep) do you want me to play him now?’”
Sabins said Zarbnisky is working on his swing and is getting better mechanically. The only time Mazey is a little uncomfortable when Zarbnisky is at the plate is in a bases-loaded situation with one out and the infield is playing up because that takes away many of the things Zarbnisky does well.
“He’s a situational (hitter), for sure,” Mazey said. “But he’s got enough power to hit homers.”
Braden Zarbnisky leads the team with five wins and six saves heading into the Big 12 Tournament. All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo
But when Zarbnisky toes the rubber in the ninth inning, Mazey has all the confidence in the world in his sophomore closer.
He’s had a direct hand in 11 of West Virginia’s 32 wins so far this year on the mound, and countless others with his ability to put the ball in play, get on base, sacrifice runners and get around the bases with reckless abandon.
He has been West Virginia’s most valuable player, something even his teammates will now readily admit. They used to get on him for the way he plays, but that was when they had to deal with him in the fall.
During the season, they are able to sit back and watch Zarbnisky unleash some that crazy on other teams.
“This spring, you haven’t heard a peep out of them,” Sabins laughed.
No, because they know.
Others are beginning to figure it out, too.
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