Mountaineers to begin Big 12 tourney play
Trending
MORGANTOWN -- As West Virginia heads into the Big 12 baseball championship tournament carrying with them confidence that comes with being the in-season champion but also bearing the burden of the No. 1 seed.
They come to Globe Life Field with a daunting 0-6 record in the home of the Texas Rangers and the weight of six losses in their last seven games to close out the regular season, they must understand that all which transpired previously is history made and that from here on they are writing history anew.
When they take the field at 1:30 p.m. today in Arlington, Texas, to face Kansas or Texas Tech, the sport remains the same as the one they have played since Valentine's Day but the game they play is very different.
A 13-0 start is yesterday's news and another 14-game winning streak from the regular season no longer carries any weight at all.
For the next few days (or however long they remain in the Big 12 championship) each game is a season of its own.
You win or you go home.
No excuses. No alibis. There is only one acceptable outcome and that is another night in a hotel room and another day on the baseball diamond.
As the road to end of the regular season proved itself to be filled with more potholes than Morgantown after a bad winter, first-year coach Steve Sabins summed it up this way for The Dominion Post:
"Now it's about, how do we write this story, because the truth is the story isn't written at all. We're still in the regular season. It's about playing really well late. It happens all the time. You see teams that have success late. They got hot and found something."
That would seem to spell disaster for WVU, which played the last two weeks of the season as if it had lost something, not found something.
But momentum in baseball is a fickle lady.
There are examples of that everywhere at the major league level.
After Carlton Fisk had hit his midnight home run in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series to give the Boston Red Sox life and a seventh game at home, you would think they would roar past Cincinnati the next day, but they lost.
After Bobby Thomson hit his "Shot Heard Round the World" to beat Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1951 NL playoff's third game, you'd believe the Yankees would be easy pickings but instead it was the Giants who went down meekly in a five-game World Series.
Yesterdays do not count in post-season games and you can't rely on playing tomorrow.
It is today or never.
Normally, you are as good as your pitching. That could be a plus for the Mountaineers as they will offer up Griffin Kirn in the opening game and, should they get past that game, Jack Kartsonas in the second game.
They are 10-4 combined with Kirn with a 3.36 ERA and Kartsonas at 2.29.
"I do feel great about our starting pitching, going into the tournament with some rest and a bye," Sabins said. "We're in as good a situation as you could ever ask for at this time of year, other than that mentality or the momentum, which some say is real and some will say is fake."
Through much of the season the bullpen had offered a viable extension of the good pitching the starters provided, but the group of Reese Bassinger, Chase Meyer and Carson Estridge came unwound down the stretch.
Normally, you might see a quick hook waiting in crucial situations, but recent trends might suggest that Sabins would give more rope to Kirn and Kartsonas to work through trouble with so much at stake.
You saw this play out in Kartsonas' final start of the season against Kansas when he worked seven innings allowing just one run on five hits while striking out eight. He had thrown 126 pitches when relieved to start the eighth inning with KU up 1-0.
Did he try to talk his manager into allowing him to continue?
"I think they knew I felt good," he said. "But there wasn't much of a conversation. Listen to the boss. They know what's best and they are making the best decision to put us in the best possible situation to win that game."
Might a different decision be made in this tournament? Might Kartsonas try to talk his way into continuing forward despite the pitch count?
As noted, the sport remains the same but the game is now different.