WVU's weekend response shows greatness

”Outline against a blue-grey October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Struhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.”

And, 17 years later, it was Rice in his poem “Alumnus Football” who wrote in 1941:

”For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name,

He writes—not that you won or lost—but how you played the Game.”

Times change and West Virginia’s baseball team is rewriting Grantland Rice’s poem like this:

”For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name,

He writes — not that you won or lost — but how you played the next game.”

Completely overlooked as a contender for the Big 12 championship, let alone a national title, when the season opened, the Mountaineers continued their drive into national contention by bouncing back from losing the opening game of a home series against Texas Tech to win the last two games.

It set up the scenario they face now like this. They travel to Texas for games Thursday, Friday and Saturday as a Top Ten team in the nation and need to win one of three games against the Longhorns’ storied program to clinch the No. 1 seed in the Big 12 Tournament.

Think about the Mountaineers this way. They were picked to finish sixth in the conference, they lost their first two games of the season at Georgia Southern then came together behind JJ Wetherholt, a leading candidate for national Player of the Year honors as America’s batting average leader at .466, and dropped two games in a row only once the rest of the year.

That game against Kansas in what proved to be the only one of seven conference series they have dropped all year.

The resiliency the Mountaineers have shown has been incredible, consistently bouncing back from any misfortune, not the least of which was an injury to Wetherholt that cost them more than a week of his services.

Despite that they ran their season’s longest winning streak to 10 games without him through much of it.

It all came together this past weekend, though, as they were climbing toward heights the program had never reached but were facing Texas Tech, nationally ranked itself, and saw it win the series opener.

How would they respond with so much at stake?

They won 17-2, then came back and took the series with a tough 5-3 victory in the finale.

“This team is so impressive with the way they bounce back from stuff,” WVU manager Randy Mazey said after the series. “The way we’re hitting, running the bases, the way we’re pitching and playing defense, we’re checking off a lot of boxes, but nothing’s over, You can’t feel too good about it and stop playing. Thursday’s game (at Texas) just became the most important of the year.”

Now there are those who would have figured after the 17-2-win .Sunday’s victory was almost guaranteed, but Mazey saw it from a different point of view. To him, winning that game was a bigger challenge than after the series opening loss.

“I just told my guys an average team after a loss like Friday would have folded up and not played hard. A good team will come out like we did and win. A great team will come out and win again,” Mazey said after Saturday’s one-sided triumph..

“You know, no matter who you play, when you play a game like this it’s inevitable that the next game is a dog fight. A few minutes ago, they were down by 15, but their next at bat, it will be a tie game,” Mazey said after Saturday’s one-sided triumph.

“Actually, the losing team in a game like that had more momentum going into the next game than the winning team. We have to come out ready to play,” he concluded.

Well, his worst fears became reality as Sunday’s game started and Mazey dared to follow his own intuition and yank starting pitcher Robby Porco in the first inning with runners at first and third and no one out.

Mazey, who is known to use a lot of pitchers, acted quickly, He was not about to let Texas Tech have a big first inning if he could help it.

“We had a fresh bullpen so we weren’t afraid to use them. That’s the first time I’ve ever changed pitchers on the third batter in the first inning, but I just didn’t like the way the momentum was going,” he said. “Noah (Short) did an unbelievable job of getting out of that first inning with only one run.”

And so now WVU has three days to prepare for Texas and know that winning one game is not a given.

“Texas is Texas. That’s one of the greatest traditions in the history of college baseball. You can’t go down there and get caught up in the atmosphere. They’ll have twice as many people. We have to just focus on the baseball, ignore the crowd and do what we’ve been doing,” he said.

He expects them to take care of business.

“I wouldn’t put anything past our team,” Mazey said.