MSNsportsNET Wrote:How Good Are They?
By John Antonik for MSNsportsNET.com
April 15, 2009


Catcher Tobias Streich is one of eight regulars hitting better than .300 in this year's lineup.
WVU Photography Services/Brian Persinger photo

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – How good is this year’s West Virginia University baseball team? That is a question a lot of people are beginning to ask.

“I don’t know,” said Baseball America’s John Manuel Wednesday morning. “Their best win is against Tennessee, yet Tennessee is having its worst year in a long time. The Kentucky win is another good one but Kentucky is just above Tennessee at the bottom of the SEC East. Winning three at UConn is probably the best thing for West Virginia because UConn can hit."

“Really, all we have to go on is the best teams they have played and they haven’t beaten them – Coastal Carolina, Minnesota and Illinois – that’s all we really have to go off of and that’s really why we are in a wait-and-see mode with them.”

West Virginia boosted its record to 27-7 with a pair of non-conference victories over Maryland Eastern Shore and Duquesne earlier this week. The Mountaineers have the seventh-best winning percentage in the country and are tied with South Florida atop the Big East standings with a 10-2 record heading into this weekend’s three-game series at Notre Dame. It's the best conference start during Coach Greg Van Zant's 15-year tenture at WVU.

The reason West Virginia has been winning so frequently is because it has one of the top hitting teams in the country with a .369 team batting average. Four regulars are batting better than .400.

“When you look up and down their lineup their numbers are just absurd,” Manuel said. “Four guys hitting .400? That doesn’t happen anymore, regardless of what the competition is. That is impressive.”

West Virginia in 2009 has good, solid college players but no bona fide, top-round professional prospects that typically attract the interest of national publications like Baseball America.

“We do pay more attention to a team that has a big-time pro prospect on it,” Manuel said. “We are not going to rank Sacramento State this year, but I guarantee you I’ve checked Sacramento State’s stats more this year than I normally would because they have a (highly rated) outfielder named Tim Wheeler.”

That’s not to say that West Virginia does not have high-level talent on its team this year.

“I do know the scouts really like (Tobias) Streich,” Manuel said. “Streich and (Jedd) Gyroko are the first two guys I think of with their team.”

Manuel believes the Big East Conference is stronger than usual this season because the bottom teams have moved closed to the middle of the pack. The league does not have a team in this week’s Baseball America rankings, nor does it have a team with a high RPI, but Manuel sees a lot of balance from top to bottom.

“We think it’s a two-bid league right now,” he said. “When you look at the RPI, Louisville plays a pretty challenging schedule and they have a good shot at getting an at-large if they continue to play well."

“They still have a pretty challenging schedule ahead of them,” Manuel added. “They still have to go to Notre Dame, they still have South Florida and they still have to play St. John’s on the road. They have a couple of mid-week games against Ohio State, Kentucky, Western Kentucky and Vanderbilt. Those are all good teams. Their RPI is probably going to stay in that 50 range.”

West Virginia’s RPI is currently 93, according to the latest NCAA ratings released April 12, meaning the Mountaineers still have considerable work to do.

“Northern teams will get the benefit of the doubt with a 50 compared to a team from the Southeastern Conference,” Manuel explained. “You are rarely going to see an SEC team get an at-large bid with an RPI that (low) where a northern team will."

“It seems like the longer they do this the committee generally sees the RPI as being good at rating teams within similar geographic regions,” Manuel explained. “Lining up the Big East, I think it does tell you something. I don’t think it tells you something comparing a Big East team to an SEC team or an SEC team to a Pac-10 team.”

For a program like West Virginia with an RPI still hovering around the 100s, Manuel said the best recipe for the Mountaineers to get into NCAA Tournament at-large consideration is to continue winning.

“The main function of the RPI is wins and losses. If you win all of your games, no matter who you are playing, you are going to end up with a pretty good RPI,” Manuel said. “If West Virginia keeps winning - even if they don’t win the conference tournament - but if they are like 42-13 or something like that, then they will likely have a pretty high RPI."

“It would be hard to keep a team like that out, although their RPI is pretty low for the record they have.”

Manuel and others who cover the sport on a national basis will likely be paying closer attention to what West Virginia does the next two weekends on the road at Notre Dame and South Florida.

“They are going on the road and they are going to play these two conference series against two of the more talented teams they are going to play this year,” Manuel said.

WVU is solid this year, no doubt. I'm still ticked that WVU has blown out UConn six times in a row when the teams supposedly have equal talent...

WVU has better pitching this year, so they should have as good a shot as anyone in this conference.

West Virginia usually schedules pretty weak and inflates their record by beating up on horrible teams. This year it looks like that philosophy might hurt them. They actually may have a decent team, but like the article says, no one can know for sure.

The problem is that Big east baseball is not very strong. We will probably get only one team in NCAA tourney and that would be whoever wins the tournament

I don't mean this as a bash, but those baseball uniforms are kind of ugly in my opinion. They look more beige than gold. Personally, I think these look much better.

Baseball tends to use WVU's traditional colors, which are OLD GOLD and BLUE. Old Gold looks sort of like a dirty brownish-orange color...

(04-16-2009 10:09 AM)bitcruncher Wrote:  Baseball tends to use WVU's traditional colors, which are OLD GOLD and BLUE. Old Gold looks sort of like a dirty brownish-orange color...

Our official color is Old Gold as well. It is a hard color to pull off. Wake Forest FB unis are the best i've seen with that color.

It looks good as trim on the all-blue uniforms. But that's about it...

(04-16-2009 10:58 AM)bitcruncher Wrote:  It looks good as trim on the all-blue uniforms. But that's about it...

Same for our purple unis, except we don't use Old Gold . I would love to play WVA in a weekend series yearly. Playing some of our OOC FB teams would be fun.