Mountaineer Baseball Reaching Heights Not Seen Since 1960s
May 28, 2024 03:32 PM | Baseball, Blog
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By: John Antonik
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – West Virginia University's baseball team has qualified for the NCAA Tournament in consecutive seasons for the first time since 1963-64.
Yes, that's a long, long time ago.
Retiring coach Randy Mazey's Mountaineers are doing today what few teams have ever managed to do around here on the baseball diamond.
In 2019, West Virginia hosted an NCAA regional for the first time since 1955, and when shortstop JJ Wetherholt is taken in the first round of this year's Major League Draft next month, Mazey will become the only coach in school history to boast two first-rounders, pitcher Alek Manoah being the other.
All 17 appearances in USA Today's top 25 coaches' poll since 2017 have come during Mazey's watch, including visits the last two seasons.
Now, West Virginia is making back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances.
To find something comparable, you must go back to those successful years in the early 1960s when the Mountaineers, led by Hall of Fame coach Steve Harrick, were dominating a Southern Conference that featured The Citadel, Davidson, Furman, George Washington, Richmond, VMI, Virginia Tech, West Virginia and William and Mary. Hall of Fame coach Steve Harrick led the Mountaineers to seven NCAA Tournament appearances from 1948 to 1967 (WVU Athletic Communications photo).
The Mountaineers, behind exceptionally strong pitching that included the likes of Tom Shafer, Craig Mankin, Joe Jeran, Dave Wilson, Wendell Backus and outstanding lefthander John Radosevich, were consistently ranked among the top 15 baseball teams in the country back then.
After capturing league titles and NCAA Tournament bids in 1961 and '62, the Mountaineers began the 1963 season by winning 14 straight games before suffering their first loss of the season to Richmond in the first game of a doubleheader at Hawley Field.
The Spiders rallied for two runs in the top of the seventh to claim a 6-4 victory. WVU responded with a 7-3 win in the nightcap and ran off a streak of 15 more wins to conclude the regular season with a 29-1 record.
The weekly newspaper, Collegiate Baseball, ranked West Virginia third after its 6-4 win at Pitt to end the regular season.
That's the highest ranking in school history.
West Virginia opened District III NCAA Tournament play at Sims Legion Park in Gastonia, North Carolina, against ACC champion Wake Forest.
Demon Deacons catcher Wayne Martin blasted a 375-foot home run on a Wilson offering with Billy Scripture on to help Wake Forest defeat West Virginia 4-3 in the tournament opener.
Pitchers Louis Howard and Bob Biddix limited WVU batters to just three hits, with shortstop Dale Ramsburg's double accounting for the only run. The other two were scored via errors.
West Virginia staved off elimination in the nightcap by outlasting SEC champion Auburn 2-1. Jeran held the Tigers to one run on four hits before giving way to Radosevich in the eighth. The flame-throwing lefty fanned five of the seven batters he faced over the final two frames to pick up the save.
Wake Forest outslugged West Virginia 12-8 the following day, and then took Florida State to a deciding game seven before the Seminoles secured an 11-5 victory to advance to the College World Series. Florida State finished ranked sixth; Wake Forest was ninth, West Virginia 11th and Auburn ranked 21st in perhaps the most difficult of the eight district tournaments that season.
First baseman Steve Berzansky, a 6-foot-2, 215-pounder who also played fullback on the football team, led the Mountaineers with a team-best .360 batting average and 11 doubles. Catcher Jim Procopio knocked in a team-best 36 runs to go with his .355 average, while Ramsburg, a slick-fielding shortstop, contributed a .320 batting average.
Jeran, with a 7-1 record and a 1.15 earned run average, and Radosevich, at 8-0 with a 1.73 earned run average, were virtually unhittable. Radosevich struck out 95 batters in just 57 innings, including 18 against West Virginia Wesleyan on May 2, 1963. Two years later, the Ronco, Pennsylvania, resident fanned a school-record 22 Waynesburg hitters to open the 1965 season.
Radosevich became the team's ace in 1964 by winning nine of his 11 decisions with a 1.00 earned run average and 123 strikeouts in 81 innings of work. He racked up victories against George Washington, VMI, The Citadel, Davidson, Richmond and Furman before dropping his first decision of the season at rival Penn State.
Radosevich also pitched a scoreless inning in the Mountaineers' 9-2 triumph over eventual NAIA national champion West Liberty, led that season by future Major League pitcher Joe Niekro.
West Virginia and West Liberty played some epic weekday nonconference baseball games during this time when the two were ranked among the best in their respective divisions. One game played at Rine Fields in Bethany, West Virginia, saw Radosevich outduel the right-handed Niekro 4-3 after the Mountaineers rallied for four runs in the top of the ninth. Radosevich struck out 17 that afternoon.
WVU won 18 straight games to begin the 1964 campaign and expanded their regular season winning streak to 33 games over two years before dropping a 3-2 decision to Furman in the second game of a doubleheader in Morgantown.
West Virginia also lost games to Penn State and Virginia Tech before concluding the regular season with wins over Tech, William and Mary and Pitt to finish the year 24-3.
Radosevich, taking the mound against seventh-ranked Ole Miss and its All-America shortstop Don Kessinger, endured one of the toughest outings of his collegiate career that afternoon in Gastonia. He gave up five earned runs on six hits in five innings before giving way to Charles Wallace. The Rebels touched up Wallace for six more runs over the final four frames to claim an 11-0 victory.
East Carolina's Carl Dadonna homered in the eighth and doubled in the ninth to lead the Pirates to a 6-5 come-from-behind victory, knocking West Virginia out of the tournament. The Mountaineers were leading 5-2 heading into the bottom of the ninth before things came unglued.
East Carolina, playing as an independent, joined the Southern Conference ranks in 1965 and soon challenged West Virginia for conference supremacy.
Furman edged West Virginia for the 1965 Southern Conference title, and despite a 12-14 overall regular season record, upset Maryland, Mississippi State and Florida State before falling one game short of the College World Series to the Seminoles in the NCAA Tournament District III championship game.
ECU clipped West Virginia by a half-game in the 1966 Southern Conference regular season standings, the 12-3 Pirates earning the league's NCAA Tournament bid by virtue of playing one fewer game than the 12-4 Mountaineers. East Carolina was quickly deposited by North Carolina and Florida State in the District III Tournament that year.
West Virginia's final Southern Conference title came in 1967 during Harrick's last season coaching the Mountaineers when he got them back into the national playoffs for the seventh time of his coaching career.
WVU exited following 8-3 and 5-0 losses to Auburn and Clemson respectively. Randy Mazey will be coaching his fourth and final NCAA Tournament team in 2024 (WVU Athletics Comnmunications photo).
One year after Harrick's retirement, West Virginia left the Southern Conference in 1968, built the WVU Coliseum where Hawley Field once stood and reduced new coach Dale Ramsburg's budget significantly as the athletic department began shifting its resources to other areas.
It would take Ramsburg 15 years to overcome the lack of funding to produce a baseball team good enough to return to the NCAA Tournament in 1982. He also led teams to tournament berths in 1985, 1987 and 1994 before his untimely death.
Before Mazey ended West Virginia's 21-year NCAA Tournament drought in 2017, WVU qualified for just one other regional berth in 1996.
This year's NCAA Tournament appearance in Tucson, Arizona, on Friday against 22nd-ranked Dallas Baptist will be West Virginia's 15th trip in school history.
