MORGANTOWN — It is not all that often you’ll find the 15th-ranked team in the country looking to play the role of spoiler, yet that’s exactly the situation WVU head baseball coach Steve Sabins and the Mountaineers face this weekend when they enter Hoglund Ballpark to face No. 7 Kansas for a three-game series.
The Jayhawks (37-11), who have won 10 in a row, are poised to complete an amazing four-year turnaround story under head coach Dan Fitzgerald, in that the season before he arrived – 2022 – Kansas was the worst team in the Big 12 and four years later the Jayhawks will capture the conference title.
Even an unlikely sweep by the Mountaineers would only close the gap between the two schools. Kansas enters the series with a four-game lead with six Big 12 games remaining. Just one win over WVU clinches at least a share of the league title for the Jayhawks, providing Arizona State doesn’t finish 6-0. Two wins by Kansas and the regular-season crown officially will reside in Lawrence, regardless of what Arizona State does.
That’s the technical stuff, the math. It doesn’t look good for the Mountaineers.
Yet I can’t get over this feeling that Sabins and WVU aren’t in a great position. Come again?
We’ve already seen the flip side to this story, the one where WVU is the favorite and has the Big 12 lead going down the stretch. We saw it in 2023 and again last season. Both ended with the Mountaineers claiming the conference title, or at least a share of it, but they came with major asterisks.
They came with WVU having everything to lose and it ended up playing as if it had the weight of the world on its shoulders. And that was not a good look.
WVU needed one win over its final three games against Texas in 2023 to capture the title outright. The Longhorns swept to force a three-way tie along with Oklahoma State. Those games were not pretty. Texas scored more runs in Game 1 of that series than WVU scored the entire series.
Last season was a little different, because the conference title came down to winning percentage. WVU hosted Kansas in the final three-game series of the regular season. It needed one win or a loss by TCU. The Mountaineers got the loss by TCU, but also got shutout twice by Kansas and hoisted a Big 12 title in front of its home fans after getting swept by the Jayhawks.
Now, it’s kind of tough to say those were choke jobs when WVU still was able to hang a banner of sorts, but, yeah, you know how it looked.
It’s time to see what Sabins and his team have up their sleeves when they have absolutely nothing to lose. The Mountaineers are already in the NCAA tournament, for what will be a fourth consecutive year.
The only thing out there to gain for WVU is one of the 16 regional host spots. Considering the Mountaineers advanced to a super regional the last two seasons by winning a regional on the road, that may not even be that big of a deal.
“You always want to play well at the end of the year,” Sabins said. “Regardless of the opponent, you’re always looking for momentum. You’re looking for some clearly-defined roles. You’re looking for the kids to play free and aggressive.”
That wasn’t the case for WVU against Kansas last season. It was trying to create history. It was trying to erase that disastrous feeling of 2023. The Mountaineers played anything but free and aggressive.
That’s not the situation a year later. The pressure is on Kansas. It hasn’t won a conference baseball title since 1949, when the league was known as the Big Seven. The only Big 12 baseball title the Jayhawks have celebrated was winning the 2006 conference tournament.
Kansas has never hosted a NCAA baseball regional … ever. All of that will be on the minds of Kansas players and coaches when WVU walks in there on Friday.
And while the Jayhawks have dominated league play thus far, maybe it’s time to see if they can handle the pressure.
WVU has been there and it didn’t handle the pressure at all. The Mountaineers will be on the other side of that story come Friday, in what should be a fantastic matchup.
