Three Strikes: Tulane, Dallas Baptist, Mountain West

A switch was flipped in American Athletic Conference play, though, and Tulane is now on a tear. Suddenly, a season that looked destined to be filled with what-ifs and narrow misses looks increasingly like it could end with a postseason appearance instead. 

Coming off of taking three out of four games against Houston at home last weekend, Tulane is 24-14 overall and 13-2 in conference, good for a game-and-a-half lead on East Carolina in the AAC standings. 

“I will tell you that is a part of a proud moment as the coach, that we are able to get up off the ground and dust off a little bit,” Tulane coach Travis Jewett said.

“A less connected group, a less coachable group, all those types of things, a less believing group, they could have just said ‘no más,’ but not our guys.”

Perhaps the simplest explanation for how Tulane ended up here after an inconsistent start is that a rather inexperienced team on the position player side in particular is beginning to grow up before our eyes. 

Freshman catcher Bennett Lee has been unstoppable since working his way into regular at-bats right around the time of the Louisiana Tech series. His offensive numbers overall are staggering (.461/.526/.627), but he’s been even better in conference play, where he’s hitting .517 to lead the league. 

He has had at least one game with three or more hits in every conference series this season, and his 0-for-4 game in the series finale against Houston was his first hitless contest against a conference opponent. 

Lee is lauded for having an approach beyond his years. The righthanded hitter uses the whole field and isn’t afraid to hit with two strikes. 

“I would say that his two-strike approach is really good, and (among) the things that he does well, as you see, is that he uses the entire field, and if you you looked at all of those two-strike hits, I would probably promise you that most of them were to the right of second base,” Jewett said. 

Freshman second baseman Chase Engelhard (.287/.371/.504), unlike Lee, has been a regular fixture in the lineup since opening weekend, but he’s completely turned his season around in conference play. He was hitting .233 going into the Memphis series to begin league games, and because he’s hitting .357 in AAC competition, his average is all the way up to .287 now. 

Freshman outfielder Jacob LaPrairie’s story in getting to this point is a bit of a mix of Lee and Engelhard. Like Lee, it took him a few weeks to fight his way into the lineup with regularity, but like Engelhard, he was slow out of the gate and has come on strong of late. His average was as low as .174 after the Louisiana Tech series, but he’s hitting .300 in conference games, which has helped get his slash line back up to .295/.418/.375. 

Third-year sophomore shortstop Collin Burns, who is more experienced than that trio of freshmen but had only started 25 games coming into this season, has also enjoyed a breakout campaign, hitting .360/.418/.579. He leads the team in doubles with 15, triples with three and stolen bases with 15. He’s also turned things up a notch in conference play, as his average is .373 in those games and four of his five homers this season have come against AAC foes. 

A lot of that difference, again, is likely due to young players becoming more comfortable with Division I baseball. But one change since conference play has started is that Jewett has taken over as third-base coach, leaving assistant coach Jay Uhlman to run the offense from the dugout. 

“Funny what happens when you remove the problem from the source, right? You get me away from the kids and turn the offense, so to speak, over to Coach Uhlman,” Jewett joked. “(We) just needed a change up. Sometimes you can’t throw your fastball for a strike, (and) you’ve got to try to find something else you can throw in there that you command, and it’s really kind of what we decided to do. I thought I needed to kind of fire myself.”

More than just a nice development for a young team learning how to win, the way these younger players have emerged has been something of a necessity for the Tulane offense, because its best returning hitter, third baseman Trevor Minder, hasn’t been himself this season. 

Minder got off to a slow start, hitting just .194 through the first four weeks of the season before going on the shelf for 15 games due to a wrist injury. He returned in time for the Wave’s road series against Memphis two weekends ago, but has gone just 4-for-23 since coming back, and he’s still looking for his first long ball of the season. 

It’s a safe bet that Minder will get things going at some point, and when he does, it will just add to what has become a fairly deep Tulane lineup. 

“He just needs time,” Jewett said of Minder. “He needs pitches, he needs to see it. He was out for however long it was. It’s just hard to re-insert yourself into a game of velocity and movement. It’s all about timing and rhythm and so I just think the more training events he has and more games he’s in, you’ll start to see his game show up.”

The strides made by the young position players would be all for naught, however, if the pitching wasn’t holding up its end of the bargain, but fortunately for the Green Wave, it has been as good as advertised. 

Righthander Braden Olthoff is 3-0 with a 1.77 ERA and a 30-to-2 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 20.1 innings in conference play, and he’s coming off of his best outing of the year, a 12-strikeout performance in eight shutout innings against Houston. That was enough to outduel Houston lefthander Robert Gasser, who has been one of the few pitchers in the conference as good as Olthoff this season. 

Behind Olthoff, lefthander Jack Aldrich (3-0, 2.49 in AAC), righthander Donovan Benoit (3-1, 3.22 in AAC) and righthander Tyler Hoffman (2-0, 3.32 in AAC) have been nearly as tough to beat in conference games. 

Closer Keagan Gillies (1.45 ERA, 18.2 IP), along with fellow relievers David Bates (0.84 ERA, 10.2 IP), Robert Price (1.54 ERA, 11.2 IP) and Clifton Slagel (2.55 ERA, 24.2 IP) have done a nice job of closing down games, and Trent Johnson (4.41 ERA, 32.2 IP) has become a valuable long reliever. In 13.1 innings in conference play, he’s allowed one run. 

As far as it has come, there’s still work to be done for Tulane to truly be in postseason position. As discussed in this space earlier this season, this is not a banner year for the AAC, so winning the conference or at least finishing in a close second is important. This isn’t the kind of season where a team can finish in the middle of the pack and feel good about its postseason prospects. 

And it wouldn’t hurt for the RPI, which is currently just inside the top 75, to move a little as well. RPI may not be the deciding metric in this unique season the way it has so often been, but in a conference that played a decent number of non-conference games like the American, it will be a factor. 

The good news is that this weekend’s series, four games on the road against East Carolina, will help the RPI just by virtue of playing those games. It’s also a chance, frankly, for a knockout blow for Tulane. A series win in Greenville would give it something close to an insurmountable lead in the standings and would put it in great position to earn an at-large bid, should it need it. 

Going into this weekend, it’s hard to know if Tulane is catching ECU at a good time or a bad time. The Pirates are coming off of back-to-back series splits, and without lefthander Carson Whisenhunt healthy and in the rotation, they’ve been a little bit short on the mound. 

Can the Green Wave take advantage of that shortcoming or will they see a motivated, angry East Carolina team frustrated that it has played under its potential the last two weekends?

No matter what, Tulane knows it’s the biggest test it has seen and will go a long way toward defining the season when it’s all said and done. 

“When you win some opportunities, then you create yourself some others, and that’s what we’ve done right here,” Jewett said. “We understand that East Carolina, they are kind of the cat’s meow in the league and they have been for a while, and they will continue to be until somebody knocks them off their perch, so to speak. So we understand what we’re up against.” 

Dallas Baptist Surges Toward Postseason

You didn’t think we’d get through the whole season without Dallas Baptist making a push for the postseason, did you?

To be fair, with the way the season began for the Patriots, you could be forgiven for thinking that their regional appearances streak, which dates back to 2014, was in jeopardy. 

It wasn’t that DBU was dropping an inordinate amount of games, per se, although there were some head-scratching results along the way, such as series losses at home to Oral Roberts and Air Force. It was more a combination of a handful of such losses with the fact that the metrics hadn’t really been in its favor. 

Its RPI just three weeks ago was well above 100 and had been stuck there basically all season. Even in a year when RPI might be deemphasized in selection committee deliberations, it seemed like a stretch for any team that played any semblance of a normal non-conference schedule with an RPI north of 100 to expect to get into the field of 64.

Now, things have changed. 

A series win over previous Missouri Valley Conference favorite Indiana State fixed the RPI problems almost overnight, catapulting DBU into the top 85. And a series win over Evansville the next weekend pushed it inside the top 70. 

Just as importantly, the successes of the last two weeks now have DBU sitting atop the MVC standings, two games clear of Indiana State in second place. Even if the RPI doesn’t come down to a level that we would normally expect of an at-large candidate, tossing an MVC regular-season title in the mix with an RPI that gets pretty close to the typical at-large cut-off could go a long way toward getting the Patriots in. 

It also won’t have to worry about quality wins holding it back, as it has twice beaten Gonzaga, currently a top 25 RPI team, and has beaten Indiana State, a top 25 RPI team as well, three times. Air Force is also a top 30 RPI team, so while DBU lost that series, its one win over the Falcons counts as a quality win. 

That said, there is still work to do in the final three weeks of the regular season, as the RPI Needs Report from Boyd’s World suggests that DBU will need to win 12 of its last 14 to finish inside the top 45. Maybe top 45 isn’t necessary with some of the other things it could have going for it, such as a conference title, but it would behoove the Patriots to get as close as possible, and that probably means winning its last three series against Illinois State, Bradley and Southern Illinois. 

The Needs Report doesn’t take the conference tournament into account, but that can cut both ways if DBU doesn’t end up winning the automatic bid. There are some good wins to be had in that event, but a quick exit could also undo some of the work it put in to be in postseason position. 

What history tells us we can count on is Dallas Baptist playing well if it can get into a regional. It has been to nine regionals as a Division I program, all under current coach Dan Heefner. In seven of those regionals, DBU has advanced to the regional final. 

So whether it has success in the postseason thanks to a physical offense that has 53 home runs on the season or it rides a pitching staff led by an ace in righthander Dominic Hamel (8-1, 2.72), the safe bet is certainly on DBU not only playing June baseball, but also pushing to have a longer stay. 

Chaos in the Mountain West

There’s no other way to put it except to say that it has been an extremely strange year in the Mountain West Conference.

San Diego State was the favorite coming into the season, and for the most part, it has had a nice year. It has been on the periphery of the Top 25 discussion at times, and going into last weekend, it was 14-7 in MWC play, comfortably in first place, with its only series loss coming to Nevada in early April. 

The Aztecs stubbed their toe in a big way last weekend, though, as they were swept in Reno, dropping their season record against the Wolf Pack to 1-5. 

Now, anything seems possible in the conference standings, and that’s a big deal in a league that is awarding its automatic bid to the regular-season champion this season. 

Nevada-Las Vegas, at 11-7, is percentage points ahead of San Diego State, which is now 14-10. Nevada follows at 12-9 and Fresno State is still in the race at 13-12, having won its last six conference games. 

As is the case in a number of other conferences, Covid-19 cancellations have done a number on schedules, and in turn, the standings. UNLV, San Jose State and New Mexico in particular have lost good chunks of games due to cancellation, and the Rebels having four total games canceled against UNM and SJSU, the two bottom teams in the standings, is not an ideal thing to have happen as they are chasing a conference title. 

The MWC is also home this season to something you don’t really ever see in mid-major conferences, and that’s teams in Air Force and Nevada with at-large-quality RPIs that are struggling to stay above water and put together something resembling an at-large resume. 

This kind of thing is common in major conferences like the SEC. Annually, there are teams in that league that are below .500 in conference play and are never serious at-large contenders that still have good RPIs because of the quality of teams they play against (and mostly lose to) week after week. 

But at the mid-major level, if a team has a good RPI, it’s probably because that team is really running up a gaudy record in its conference or the conference is having a historically good season as a whole. Neither of those things are true in the case of Air Force or Nevada. 

The Falcons have an RPI of 30. They also have quality wins over Louisiana State and Arizona. With a good record and a place near the top of the league standings, that would make them shoo-ins for an at-large bid, but that’s the problem. They are just 17-18 overall and 9-12 in the MWC, good for fifth and two games back of fourth-place Fresno State. They have won just two of their six conference series. 

There is still time for Air Force to remedy some of those issues, and six games coming up against San Jose State and New Mexico should help, but at this point, the type of run it needs to go on to become an at-large candidate might also be the type of run it would need to go on to finish atop the league standings, which would render the at-large debate moot. 

Nevada has an RPI of 54 along with a 15-16 overall record and 12-9 mark in the league. Because it is still very much in the thick of the title race, it’s even more true for the Wolf Pack than for the Falcons that the path to getting its record (and in Nevada’s case, its RPI) to a place where it would be of at-large-quality would probably also coincide with Nevada making a move to the top of the standings and just winning the auto bid instead, especially since it only has three weekends of conference play left. 

There are four teams truly in the race to win the automatic bid with four weeks remaining, so the MWC will be a fun conference to watch in the stretch run, and absolutely anything can happen, as we’ve seen in the results of late. 

At the same time, the computer numbers have worked in a positive way for a couple of teams in the league this season, and you have to wonder if perhaps the chance for the conference to enjoy a breakthrough season as a multi-bid league for the first time since 2014 is going to pass it by.