Just because you lose doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten how to win.
It’s a truth not lost on the Baylor baseball team, which will learn of its NCAA tournament destination on Monday when the field is announced at 11 a.m. on ESPNU. The Bears (34-17) have clearly hit a slump at the end of the season, dropping four of their past five games against some quality opponents. That includes two losses at Oklahoma State to end the regular season, and two more to OSU and TCU following an opening win over Oklahoma at the Big 12 tournament.
But the Bears still remember what it takes to win, said pitching coach Jon Strauss. And it all goes back to the fact that they have players who have been there and done that. To paraphrase Al Pacino as Lt. Col. Frank Slade from Scent of a Woman, “They’ve been around, ya know?”
“The best thing is we’ve got an old group of guys, and they know how to win. So, I don’t think this will be a problem,” Strauss said. “If we had a young group, we might be pretty worried about their psyche. But like I said, these guys can flush it. Coming into this, knowing that we’re most likely going to keep playing, I think we’re going to be able to turn it around and basically refresh and get going again.”
Baylor didn’t land an NCAA tournament host site when those 16 schools were announced on Sunday, but that wasn’t a surprise given the way the Bears finished. Baylor owns an RPI of 31 nationally, so even the Bears’ strong second-place finish in the Big 12 regular season wasn’t going to be enough to bring more games to Baylor Ballpark.
So, now the only questions that remain are, where will Baylor land, and who will be there with them?
With Texas A&M missing out on a host spot Sunday, it looks as though LSU or Arkansas are the most likely regional spots for Baylor. The NCAA baseball committee tends to heavily weigh geography when assembling regionals, and the Bears – who traveled to Stanford last year – would make sense as a No. 2 seed in Baton Rouge or Fayetteville.
Speaking of unknowns, the bullpen was a big mystery for Baylor when the 2019 season started. After having graduated a crop of wily veterans, the coaches didn’t know quite what to expect from the mostly unproven group that included Daniel Caruso, Luke Boyd and Ryan Leckich.
