West Virginia baseball begins their NCAA Tournament journey on Friday when they face Dallas Baptist in what is a stacked Tucson Regional.
However, the Mountaineers are focusing on themselves as they are carrying a level of confidence to a familiar place.
Think back to February 2023 and West Virginia made the exact same trip to the exact same place they are headed this weekend. The Mountaineers went on the road to face Arizona last season, taking two of three games from the Wildcats.
The series included a steal of home to clinch game one from JJ Wetherholt, and then a 5-1 victory in game two to win the series.
“Played great out there,” WVU head coach Randy Mazey said of last season’s success against the Wildcats. “JJ (Wetherholt) swung it incredibly well. Sam White played incredibly well. A lot to be said for playing on a field that you have confidence in.”
WVU has had a lot of time off after their 0-2 showing in the Big 12 Tournament. They will have had more than a week to rest before first pitch against Dallas Baptist on Friday.
“Looking back at it now, we had a nice break here at home and got to reset our minds a little bit,” WVU pitcher Derek Clark said.
The Mountaineers will need Clark and the rest of the pitching staff to step up if they are going to want to have success this weekend in Arizona. In last year’s regional, WVU gave up 12 runs, five runs, and 10 runs in the three games they played, leading to a 1-2 exit in Lexington.
The Mountaineers being on the road for this regional is no surprise for Mazey though. The skipper who could be entering his final weekend as the head man at WVU said they as a team knew going into the season their success would have to come away from Morgantown if they wanted to do something special.
“We know going into the season if we want to do something special, we have to do it on the road somewhere. It’s so hard to host a regional. I don’t know that DBU feels that way. They’ve hosted regionals and played well at home. So maybe the west coast thing will affect them more than it will us,” Mazey said.
Wetherholt carried a similar tone, but a slightly different message with him. Wetherholt, who went a combined 7-for-13 with a home run in last year’s regional doesn’t want him team to feel the heat of the recent success from DBU or Arizona. Wetherholt said it’s a clean slate and anyone can beat anyone this weekend.
“My biggest thing is it doesn’t matter what the teams have done so far to this point, everybody is 0-0. We just got to go in there not getting scared of teams with good records. Dallas Baptist has won a ton of games; Arizona is on a 11-game win streak. We kind of throw all that stuff aside, like, hey, we’re even now, it just matters who wins this game any way possible,” Wetherholt said. “We can beat any of those teams so just understanding that and playing like that.”
WVU is likely going to face DBU ace Ryan Johnson on Friday to open the weekend.
Johnson has a 1.98 ERA this season and has proven to be one of the best pitchers in the country. Mazey is quite familiar with Dallas Baptist dating back to his days at TCU. DBU has always played Big 12 teams tough according to Mazey and the numbers back it up as they went 5-2 against the Big 12 this season.
“That’s the team that after you play them, you go back to the office and say, why are we playing DBU,” Mazey said.
Despite what happens this weekend for West Virginia though, Mazey said he wants his guys to play loose and to have fun. He wants them to enjoy something he says they will remember for the rest of their lives.
“The thing our guys know, no matter how they perform, I’m going to love them all just the same. So, it gives them the freedom to not put any pressure on themselves, just go out and have fun playing baseball,” Mazey said. This is going to be something they remember for the rest of their lives. Might as well enjoy it and make the best of it.”
WVU’s regional journey begins Friday afternoon at 3:00 p.m. EST with the game being televised on ESPN2. The winner will play the winner of No. 1 Arizona-No. 4 Grand Canyon, while the two losers would then face off in an elimination game on Saturday.
