West Virginia baseball heads to the Big 12 Tournament, knowing there is work to be done if they want to end up hosting a regional.
As the Mountaineers climbed to historic heights in the rankings this year, head coach Randy Mazey kept reminding his team to not pay too much attention to the rankings as there is still work to be done. However, after WVU was swept by Texas, the reality is West Virginia has to make some serious noise in the Big 12 Tournament if they want to get back into the regional host conversation.
“I don’t have any idea,” Mazey said Tuesday of how many games he thinks his team has to win in order to host a regional. “I’m not in that room with those committee members and know what they talk about. All we can do is go and try and win each game we play and if we do well enough and somebody feels like we’re worthy of playing in Morgantown, then we’ll play in Morgantown.”
The road to the Big 12 Championship will start on Wednesday night. The three-seeded Mountaineers face the six-seed Texas Tech.
These two teams faced off in Morgantown 10 days ago from when first pitch is set to be thrown on Wednesday. In that series, West Virginia took two of three, and held Texas Tech to just 10 runs the whole series, while the Red Raiders averaged 8.9 runs per game this season.
“That was one of our better weekends of the year,” Mazey said of the Tech series. “We pitched really well against a dangerous team. They’ve seen all of our guys now, so they have a little bit of an advantage as far as knowing what our pitchers look like and the shape of their pitches. We got to try and do the same thing — limit that offense as much as we can.”
A big reason for WVU’s success was their ability to limit the damage of Kevin Bazzell and Gavin Kash — Texas Tech’s 3-4 hitter combination.
In the series against West Virginia, the pair combined to go 4-for-22 (.182) from the plate in the three-game series. Those two were both named to the All-Big 12 First Team, and Kash led the Big 12 in home runs with 24, while Bazzell had the fifth-best batting average in the conference.
Against the Red Raiders, West Virginia is going with David Hagaman to start the game, his first career start.
“We’re going to start David Hagaman on Wednesday,” Mazey said. “He’s pitched great and there’s a lot of variables involved but I think we need to get off to a really good start and try to get into the middle of a game and have a chance to win it.”
Hagaman has seen his most usage in his last two outings against Texas and Texas Tech. In those games, he has allowed no runs and just one hit across 6.2 innings of work. The most pitches Hagaman has thrown in a game this season is 55 against Texas Tech 10 days ago.
“Our starting pitching’s been good the whole season and we’re just trying to line it up the best we can to give us the best opportunity to win games one, two, and three,” Mazey said.
West Virginia will look to Hagaman to try and give them innings — clean innings — so they are not falling behind like they did over the weekend against Texas.
In innings 1-3 over the weekend, West Virginia was outscored by Texas a combined 19-2. In innings 4-9, Texas outscored West Virginia 10-7.
West Virginia’s Path
West Virginia’s division in the Big 12 Tournament features three other schools in which West Virginia took the series from. The winner of WVU/Texas Tech will face the winner of Oklahoma/Oklahoma State. Ideally, the Mountaineers win game one and then they don’t have to face the loser’s side of the division which would feature four games in three days just to make it to the championship round.
What needs to happen?
West Virginia has to boost their RPI to help their hosting chances and the only way they do that is by winning games. Both Texas and Oklahoma State — the other co-Big 12 regular season champions — were host sites in D1Baseball’s regional predictions earlier this week. West Virginia was a two-seed in large part because their RPI dropped six spots after falling to Texas. WVU is 19th in the country in RPI, and Oklahoma State is 18th. Get deep into the tournament — even just past Oklahoma State — and your RPI probably jumps theirs, and you’re back in the hosting conversation.
Game Information
West Virginia and Texas Tech have first pitch set for 8:30 p.m. EST. However, other games could run long, meaning WVU’s start time could possibly get pushed back. The games will be televised on ESPN+.
