Was WVU’s early success a mirage?

Mountaineers eliminated from Big 12 tournament in 3-2 setback to Oklahoma State

MORGANTOWN -- Do you remember the day you learned there was no Santa Claus; there was no Easter Bunny; that the tooth fairy was your mother or your father.

If you are a West Virginia athlete, it seems, that day comes one way or another every year.

No matter the sport -- football, basketball, baseball.

No matter how good a year, no matter what kind of season, there is always Pitt or Notre Dame or Cal waiting at the end. Ask Pat White or Major Harris or Jerry West.

Now, you can ask Randy Mazey, too.

His Mountaineers ran out of miracles in a season that turned from a dream to a nightmare in a Texas minute as the baseball team he manages, the one that seemed certain to be the sole champion of the Big 12 regular season, the one that was already selling tickets to an NCAA Regional they were going to host, that figured to make at least a deep run into the Big 12 Baseball Championship, proved themselves just to be another athletic team that could not take the final step.

The week started with so much hope and so much hype, with JJ Wetherholt being named the Big 12 Player of the Year, with Mazey being named the conference's Manager of the Year and with sprinkling of their stars on the All-Conference teams.

And then they had to play games. They were swept by Texas and had to settle for part of what was the first three-way tie for the regular season championship in league history.

When quizzed about what had happened this past week after being on "kind of a roll before going down to Austin, Mazey responded honestly.

"Kind is an understatement," Mazey began, referring to the hot streak they were going through. I think you had us No. 6 in the nation at one point and then you saw us play and that didn't work out too good."

They fell from No. 6 to No. 21 in the national rankings, dropped to a No. 3 seed in the tournament and then were given a slice of humble pie on what was supposed to be their best year ever as it was two and through in the conference tournament.

"We didn't look like a Top 10 team in the nation (in Austin)," Mazey said. "We needed to come here and play well. Going into this past weekend we hadn't lost three games in a row this year or last year."

You had to go back to 2021 to find the Mountaineers suffering through a five- and six-game losing streak, their current streak now at five games.

"We have been really, really good for a real long time and if you know anything about college baseball, you know how hard that is to do. But that happens."

They lost the opener, 6-2, to Texas Tech on Wednesday in a game in which they displayed very little interest, and then on Thursday, it was Oklahoma State, the No. 2 seed, surviving an intriguing afternoon of baseball that had all the trappings an elimination game is supposed to have.

Good pitching, good defense, some umpiring controversies, a moment of hot words between opponents Tim Tucker of WVU and Watts Brown of Oklahoma State, and a bad hop that could have thrown matters into West Virginia's hands.

But as it always seems to happen, it ended with the tying run at third base, the lead run at second and another runner at first base with two out, the Cowboys having just taken a 3-2 lead in the bottom of the eighth on shortstop Ric Riggio's single to right.

One more hit, any kind of hit, and WVU probably would have won the game. They'd even have taken another bad hop hit like the double Caleb McNeeley got in the midst of that ninth-inning threat, the ball kicking over the shoulder of the Cowboy third baseman.

Certainly, an entire state of 1.8 million took that as an omen from the baseball gods that things were changing for West Virginia, that maybe this was the time they would actually win a game they had to win.

Add that bit of good fortune to Wetherholt's return to being the best hitter in college baseball with a single, a double, a walk and two hit-by-pitches to bring his average for the year to .449 and you know that everyone "from Weirton to Welch, from Martinsburg to Matewan and all points in between" this incredible season may go on.

But, instead, it would prove to be just one more not-so-instant replay that would leave the Mountaineers' faithful wondering when and how they would get the monkey off their back.

There is more ahead, of course. There is the NCAA Tournament, which undoubtedly will bring one of the three Big 12 co-champions into its field, although when someone tried to get Mazey to say he was sure they would go after Wednesday's first game loss, he declined the invitation.

"I feel like we can't assume we're in the NCAA Tournament," he said then. "I thought that last year (a year when they were 33-22) when I sat here … and it didn't happen."

But after Thursday's game, Mazey told his team that he believed they would be in the NCAA's.

"That's the first time, in our post-game huddle, I ever stood there telling my team we are going to have practice next week. If they don't let the Big 12 champs in the postseason you are going to have to be talking to me through a glass partition probably," Mazey said.

"That would be blasphemous to not put the Big 12 champions in the postseason, so I feel really confident we will be playing next week."

Well, they have 39 wins now and that conference championship, so expect to hear their name called in Monday's Selection Show, and hope that maybe the events of the past week have put a big enough burr under their saddle to make them mad and ready to finally have a breakthrough tournament.