MORGANTOWN — There are any number of takes that came out of the NCAA baseball tournament selection show on Monday, and not to get into so much which ones or right or wrong, well, yours is wrong.
For instance, you can take a look at the Morgantown Regional, which opens play at noon Friday, and come away with the notion that it just may be the most loaded regional of the 16 that were announced, because it includes traditional power names such as Wake Forest and Kentucky.
Just having Wake Forest in your regional would be enough to scare the beejeebies out of any casual college baseball fan, because the Demon Deacons and their three trips to the College World Series make them one of the “known” brands in the sport.
Throw in Kentucky, which gave the Mountaineers a wild ride in the Clemson Regional last season, and the fact that the Wildcats hail from the mighty, mighty SEC, and you’ve got yourself one loaded regional in Morgantown.
Or you could take it like this: The national championship tournament is about to begin and WVU is included in the same regional as traditional powers Wake Forest and Kentucky and both of those teams are traveling to West-by God-Virginia to play baseball.
Just 10 years ago, you’d have to get banged in the back of the head at least 50 times by a baseball bat before you’d believe something like that was even remotely possible.
“It’s awesome,” WVU head coach Steve Sabins said. “I could talk about that for hours. When I got here in 2015, people didn’t even know we had a baseball team back then. “We were transitioning from Hawley Field into a beautiful ballpark that was capable of hosting.
“We broke through and hosted in 2019, which was the first time in 65 years when we pulled that off. Now, we’ve been to four consecutive regionals and back-to-back supers. It’s become more common for us to be mentioned with those types of programs.”
The fact that it’s a stacked regional should not be your first thought. Instead, the question should be: How cool is it that the WVU baseball program has elevated itself to a level that two traditional powers have to come to our place to play in the NCAA tournament?
“I think in the baseball world, to the people who really follow the sport, it’s not that surprising, because they know what our program is and how it’s been built,” Sabins continued. “To the casual observer, you probably do have some of those feelings. Like, man, those teams are traditional (powers) and they’ve been great, but I think we have performed at a very high level consistently for the last six or seven years.”
For the sake of comparison, maybe it would be something like Lady Gaga showing up to do a show at the Hazel Ruby McQuain Amphitheater or the Pittsburgh Steelers playing a game at Milan Puskar Stadium.
OK, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but the fact that No. 9 WVU (39-14) is on the docket to play in a NCAA tournament and both Wake Forest and Kentucky have to travel to Morgantown, it shows how far the program has come under former head coach Randy Mazey and how Sabins has jacked it up a few more notches in just his second season at the helm.
Where does this one fit with all of the other accomplishments the Mountaineers have achieved in the last eight or nine years?
“It’s a good question,” Sabins said. “I think it was an easier answer when we had never done anything like this before. This one is different. It feels like we’re beginning to stack that success on top of each other. I think that way, too. How is this different? Why is this different? How did we end up here?”
The other notion was the overall bigger picture. WVU was the 16th and final team listed as a regional host. That makes WVU the overall 16th-seed, and if the Mountaineers advance, they most likely have a trip to Los Angeles in store for them and a date with No. 1 ranked UCLA in the super regionals.
Ugh, right?
Well, just the fact that you’re already assuming WVU will advance, or you expect the Mountaineers to advance, is another sign of where the program currently sits.
Here’s another story: The NCAA baseball tournament configuration is so unique that literally anything can happen.
Don’t believe it? You say a No. 1 seed can’t lose in the regionals? Well, you only have to go back to last season when both the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds lost in the opening regionals. Heck, seven of the 16 regional hosts last season were eliminated prior to super regionals.
So, Morgantown, sit back and relax, because it’s going to start getting crazy around here by Friday. Hope you enjoy it.
