Couch: Absent 'knuckleheads,' MSU baseball enjoying special season
- Nebraska at MSU
- When: 1:05 p.m. Saturday, Sunday, Monday
- Where: McLane Baseball Stadium, East Lansing
- Tickets: $5; $3 children 12-under
EAST LANSING – Perhaps it was the lingering sting of being left out of the NCAA tournament last spring. Or just a fortunate mix of modest egos. Maybe coach Jake Boss’ annual message finally hit home.
Whatever the reason, the Michigan State baseball team’s 30-11 record is no accident. Nor is it a collision of overwhelming pro prospects.
“In September, in fall ball, you could just see something different about this group,” said Boss, in his eighth season at the helm of the Spartans. “And I’m not saying wins and losses. We’ve had some teams with some knuckleheads on it that have won a lot of games. But you just felt like it’s a great group of kids to be around. There was just something different about this group.”
It turns out, something different translated to winning, even if MSU didn’t have some of the big boppers of years past. The Spartans began the season 14-1 during their off-the-radar southern tour and are 10-5 in Big Ten play, in third place entering this weekend’s home series with Nebraska, Saturday through Monday. The two teams in front of them by a game in the win column, Minnesota and Indiana, meet this weekend.
In a market with a popular minor league baseball team, when MSU is this good, the Spartans give this community big-time baseball where results matter as much as the ballpark experience. You’ve got two weekends to see it, including a May 19 to 21 home series against Maryland.
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“It’s a selfless group, a bunch of good teammates, guys who really care about each other and guys that really don’t put a whole lot of stock in the draft and their own numbers,” Boss said. “They just want to go out and have a good time and play for each other. We’ve been talking about it for a long time, being a number of years. But this year was the year they just finally kind of embraced it.”
MSU’s reward is a likely NCAA tournament bid, whether they win the Big Ten tourney or not. In 2012, under Boss, the Spartans reached the postseason as an at-large. In 2011, they won the Big Ten regular season title but were left out.
With an RPI (Ratings Percentage Index) ranking of 47 and two of its remaining Big Ten series against teams that won’t damage that ranking simply by showing up, MSU appears in firm control of its NCAA tournament fate.
“If we take care of business, we should be in good shape,” Boss said.
Last year’s postseason snub helped to fuel what Boss and his players describe as an every-game focus. The random Tuesdays against Western Michigan have to be treated like a Friday against Michigan. It’s all part of the resume, especially for a school that can only control its schedule so much.
There are no midweek April trips to play SEC powers. Class schedules and budgetary realities prevent those sorts of pie-in-the-sky opportunities. And it didn’t help that Oregon, which MSU brought in for an early April weekend series, wound up having a down year. Two of the games were canceled for snow anyway. Such is college baseball in the North.
“We talked about the selection show last year and what it felt like to sit there and watch it and hear that we’re the No. 65 team (in a 64-team field),” Boss said. “I think it’s important to acknowledge that stuff because it’s real.”
“We saw teams (get in last year) that we played, handled well and beat,” said junior pitcher Cam Vieaux, who has a 6-2 record and leads the Big Ten with a 1.69 earned-run average. “Our strength of schedule, being that we were a northern team, kind of left us out. It caused us not to take any games lightly this year.”
Vieaux, a 6-foot-4 lefty who was chosen by the Detroit Tigers in the 19th round of last year’s draft, has been the ace of a staff that boasts the third-ranked ERA in college baseball (2.50).
The arms and depth of arms are what separates this team beyond its camaraderie.
But again, the camaraderie can’t be overstated. There isn’t the individual stat obsession that often engulfs teams in a sport that’s built on stats, with pro scouts judging those stats.
“I definitely saw that (closeness) right when I got here,” said junior infielder Jordan Zimmerman, a junior college transfer who led Mesa Community College to the NJCAA World Series title two years ago. “… Guys are willing to bat each other over from second to third.”
It’s not that there aren’t guys with their own careers to consider. There are about seven players, Boss estimated, Zimmerman and Vieaux included, with pro potential and decisions to make at season’s end. But they haven’t been all that heralded all the way through. Zimmerman, for example, who is third in the Big Ten in hitting with a .391 batting average, was hardly recruited out of high school.
“In years past we’ve had some big time prospect guys, guys who were kind of big names in high school and continued to be big names at this level,” Vieaux said. “We’re a bunch of guys that grind. We’ve all kind of earned our position. We’ve all worked to get how we are now. That blue-collar mentality has stuck with us. That’s why we’re playing as well as we are right now.”
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.
Nebraska at MSU baseball
When: 1:05 p.m., Saturday, Sunday and Monday
Where: McLane Baseball Stadium, East Lansing
Admission: $5; $3 children 12-under
TV/Radio: Spartan Sports Network (online)/ Big Ten Network (Monday only)