SDSU Baseball Sitting in Familiar Position
Three hundred sixty-four days have passed, but the Western Athletic Conference baseball picture focuses today on the same four teams playing for the conference championship in Honolulu’s Rainbow Stadium.
San Diego State, Hawaii, Brigham Young and Wyoming will play again in the double-elimination tournament. The only difference from last year is that SDSU and BYU have flip-flopped in the standings.
A year ago Monday, SDSU defeated Hawaii in the final game of the regular season to finish first, then lost to second-place BYU in the tournament championship game.
Last Monday, SDSU defeated Hawaii in the final game to take second behind BYU. The Aztecs will open the tournament against the 25th-ranked Rainbows tonight at 10 (PDT).
The stakes are similar, too. The winner will receive one of 27 automatic berths in next week’s 48-team NCAA tournament; the losers take their chances with the NCAA playoff selection committee.
Jim Dietz, SDSU’s coach of 18 years, can tell you a thing or two about the process.
After finishing second in 1988, SDSU was not selected because the committee said it played too many ‘light’ teams in building its 47-18-1 record.
So this year, Dietz revamped the schedule with highly regarded teams such as Florida and Fresno State (the only two teams to score 10 or more runs against SDSU), and wound up 36-23. If the Aztecs win the WAC or come in second, they would have either 39 or 40 victories, a very respectable number in Dietz’s estimation.
“It would be interesting to see what they would do if we came in second,” Dietz said. “If we didn’t make it, I’d like to see them use that same philosophy that they told me last year.”
But the business at hand for SDSU is winning the WAC playoffs.
If pitching wins championships, then consider that SDSU led the WAC and ranked among the nation’s leaders in earned-run average at 3.05. Hawaii was second in the conference at 5.11.
Senior reliever Dave Riddle (4-4, three saves) led the WAC with a 1.75 ERA, and senior Rob Brown (9-5) led all starters (for the second year in a row) at 3.07. Of the nine Aztec pitchers in Hawaii, sophomore starter Erik Plantenberg (6-3) has the highest ERA at 3.74.
In all, five of the top eight ERAs in the WAC are SDSU’s.
SDSU pitchers also led in strikeouts (441), fewest walks (192) and fewest hits allowed (439). Of particular note is having more strikeouts than hits allowed; Gary Kondratek, SDSU’s pitching coach, says that’s almost unheard of in college.
“Most of that can be attributed to depth,” he said. ‘We’ve never been this deep. Never. That depth has helped keep everyone fresh.”
The problem has been offense. The Aztecs batted less than .300 (.278) for the first time in 12 years.
“It concerns me” Dietz said, “but I told the team before the season started if we could score five runs a game, we’d win our share of games (SDSU averaged 5.4).
“The strength of a team is measured in the depth of its pitching staff. We’re probably the only team in this conference that has enough pitching to pull this thing off.”
Notes
SDSU (36-23, 17-9) will be the home team against Hawaii (36-24, 18-10). No. 17 BYU (43-14, 21-7) is the home team against Wyoming (36-19, 17-10) in the first game. . . . In WAC play, SDSU took three of four games from Hawaii and Wyoming and split with BYU. . . . The WAC champion will probably play at Fresno State or Arizona in one of the two NCAA West Regionals. . . . Hawaii officials have said all three days of the tournament are sold out.