WVU baseball's success no surprise in clubhouse

In fact, the only people who haven’t been surprised by the surge to the top the Mountaineers put forth were those players and coaches who resided within the WVU locker room.

“We knew in the fall we were pretty good and a chance to do some pretty cool things,” starting pitcher Blaine Traxel admitted.

Of course, every team dreams the dream in the fall. After all, everyone is undefeated then, but usually one’s analysis of his ability, and his team’s, is inflated because it hasn’t faced the opposition on the field and hasn’t faced the many unexpected challenges that come during the course of a season.

Traxel understands that.

“It’s always the goal going into it, but I think we had a realization of it. We could see it in the fall while putting it together and it just happened,” he said after finishing off Texas Tech, 17-2, in his last start.

Manager Randy Mazey had put together a talented unit using the transfer portal and by recruiting some solid young pitchers, but no one knew how it would fit together, how quickly it matured.

Who could have guessed that JJ Wetherholt would jump from a .308 hitter with five home runs and 39 RBI last year to a leading candidate for college baseball’s Player of the Year honors while leading the nation in hitting at .466 with 15 home runs and 56 RBI?

Who could have guessed that pitcher Carlson Reed would emerge as a shut-the-door closer, his ERA dropping from 5.23 to 1.13 and his saves going from zero to seven?

Who knew that Tevin Tucker would shake off three years of batting beneath .200 to jump from the bottom of the batting order to leadoff and bring a .331 average to date with him?

What had been a question mark of a team turned into an exclamation point, with contributions coming from everywhere in the lineup ... from sophomore Grant Hussey, a West Virginia native, to transfer Caleb McNeely, who brings a .299 average with 12 homers and 47 RBI into the Texas series.

And Ben Hampton lived up to being the No. 1 pitcher with a 5-2 record while Traxel would spin a 7-4 record while completing a nation-leading five games.

Certainly, the signs early offered no hint as WVU lost its first two games at Georgia Southern and then lost its second conference series of the year, two games to one, to Kansas, the No. 8 seed for the upcoming tournament.

But nothing seemed to shake this group, perhaps because of the culture Mazey had created for the team.

“You are playing the same game every day,” Hussey said. “You go home, go to bed, get up, come to the field and play the same game you did yesterday.”

Win or lose, that’s it.

“The next game is the most important game of the year,” he has said, over and over.

This weekend, though, it has reached the point where that becomes a reality.

“Texas is Texas,” he said. “It has one of the great traditions in the history of college baseball. We can’t go down there and get caught up in the atmosphere. They’re going to have good crowds there. They’ll have twice as many people, maybe three times as many people as we’ve had (in Morgantown, where record crowds have become common).

“We have to focus on the baseball and not the crowd and do what we’ve been doing. I wouldn’t put anything past our team and what they’re capable of.”

Potentially needing only one win out of three games doesn’t sound like much, but they are on the road playing a team that can win the regular-season championship by sweeping WVU, so all the work, all the accomplishments, they all are on the line Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Austin.