Blueandgoldnews.com WVU baseball Coach Steve Sabins and player Sam White.

MORGANTOWN — Football is built upon its speed and power, a game that had it been around in the days of the Roman empire might have turned the battles between Gladiators obsolete.

It is sumo wrestling with a ball, an aerial circus without a tent and a tug of war without a rope.

Basketball is built on non-stop action, incredible athleticism; a game played by someone as small as Muggsy Bogues and as big as Shaquille O’Neal.

But baseball is a different kind of game.

It is pastoral in nature, leisurely played without a clock, a game where it is much fun to watch the players in the dugout as it is to watch those on the field, where you enjoy the interaction of the fans in the stands, who become friends, whether you meet them at their seat or in the beer line.

It is almost a certainty, having spent a lifetime observing the sport and its arenas, that had Abner Doubleday not invented it, surely Oscar Mayer or August A. Busch would have.

On Friday at high noon, West Virginia University’s baseball team embarks on its third consecutive journey into the NCAA Championships, facing Kentucky in the Clemson regional, and as noted there is always a different feeling in baseball championship competition than there is in football or basketball.

The intensity is there, yes; but it comes with a more leisurely, relaxed approach … perhaps playing out the true existence of the everyday person seeking a goal.

Time spent together in locker rooms, in dugouts, on buses and in airplanes .. They lead to a different sort of camaraderie between participants on teams and the fans that follow them.

Baseball is fun and for the past three years these tournament-bound WVU teams have been prime practitioners of the art.

Two years ago, you may recall, WVU players created their pretzel necklaces that were given out to home run hitters. This was no store-built Viking hat; no sledgehammer pilfered from some vacant lot; no toy Nerf ball.

This was of their own doing, a product of the leisurely approach there is in baseball. It was originated by junior pitcher Ben Hampton, who was looking for something to do between starts.

“I kind of just made it to make everyone laugh. I honestly got bored in the dugout,” said Hampton, who was one of the Mountaineers’ better pitchers before transferring to TCU. “But it turned out to be our home run chain, and I think people kind of enjoy it.”

As fragile as its twisted humor was, it became something of a symbol of success on a Mountaineer team that included JJ Wetherholt, in the midst of having the greatest season any WVU player had ever had, which included a .449 batting average and 16 home runs.

Randy Mazey was coaching that team.

“I don’t pay attention to that, but I do see it in there,” he said wryly at the time. “The games they want to play in the dugout, if they are having fun, I’m all about it.”

Ah, fun. Last year fun included a run to the NCAA Super Regional and that became known as “The Year of the Gorilla Roar.”

That began in an intrasquad game shortly after “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” was released in theaters.

The way Wetherholt remembered it at the Super Regional in Tucson after making a great leaping catch of a line drive and turning it into a double play was like this:

“I just started being a gorilla in an intrasquad game. And I just figured, going into Tucson, we were going to play some good teams, teams that were ranked higher than us and picked more than us to win.

“So I was like, ‘We’re pretty good in an intrasquad game, how about we just treat this like one?’ So, I was just a gorilla all weekend, and it helped some of the guys stay loose.”

While Mazey was still coach of that team, current coach Steve Sabins was fully behind it.

“I’m a firm believer in all you can ever strive to be is authentic, so be yourself,” Sabins said as he remembered it the day after he was officially named head coach. “I think a really good example of that is when we saw JJ Wetherholt become a gorilla in the Tucson Regional.

“We talked about that I was in intrasquad games because he was always screaming and doing silly stuff on the field. It was like, ‘Keep rolling with that.’ If you’re a weirdo in intrasquads, be a weirdo during the game … like, be a gorilla. Go pound your chest. Be authentic. Be yourself.”

As WVU enters this stage of the season in a slump, they need to find a little more of whatever that was, a way to lighten the load, and a few 150-watt bulbs to lead them back to where they were.

Kyle West, their leading hitter, understands that. He was there for the pretzels. He was there for the gorilla.

“We just had fun. We all love each other. We acted like monkeys,” he said this week. “We carried the fun we had with each other off the field onto the field. We didn’t want it to end. We knew for some people it was going to be their last ever college game and for us, it was going to be our last ever game for us as a team.”

And that’s how it is now. While it’s not a single elimination game, each game has to be approached as if it were. Not with the tenseness that restricts the ability to play at your best, but with that looseness that allows you to be yourself without a care in the world.