Three Strikes: UC Santa Barbara, La Salle, New Mexico’s Ray Birmingham

For coach Andrew Checketts, though, it was both a series his team was competitive in to a degree that the final scores don’t necessarily reflect and a result borne out of the fact that his team just simply wasn’t playing well at that point, even in that 7-1 start. 

“The frustration at that point was (that) we had played like that up to that point. We had not played well,” Checketts said. 

“We were winning, but our bullpen was leaky against Santa Clara, our bullpen wasn’t very good against Pepperdine, the defense was in and out, so we felt fortunate that we were winning those games those first two weekends. (When) we played against Oregon, we just played the same, their bullpen just didn’t give it back to us. In the first two weekends, that had happened where we coughed it up and the other team coughed it up. When we played Oregon, we coughed it up and they didn’t give it back to us.”

Since then, save for perhaps a four-game series split with Cal State Fullerton to begin Big West play that they would like to have back, the Gauchos have been the team we expected them to be, at least in terms of wins and losses. 

But again, they’re not doing it in the way we anticipated they would do it. This was expected to be a pitching-centric team, but so far, the offense has been the more consistent unit. That’s been a pleasant surprise for a team that went into the season still looking for impact bats after it lost many of its best hitters after the 2019 campaign and then never got a chance to fully audition everyone in the shortened 2020 season. 

The lineup is hitting .297/.388/.462. Its 34 home runs coming out of the weekend were far and away the most in the Big West, and it also leads the league in doubles with 69 and stolen bases with 50. 

Along the way, some familiar faces have played big roles, such as fourth-year junior utilityman Jason Willow (.272/.333/.388) and third-year sophomore DH Christian Kirtley (.257/.351/.407), but more important has been the emergence of some new stars in the order, including third-year sophomore outfielder Broc Mortensen (.302/.417/.566), who played two years of football at Cal Poly before heading to junior college to focus on baseball, fourth-year sophomore third baseman Cole Cummings (.336/.463/.481), second-year freshman infielder Jordan Sprinkle (.410/.458/.590) and true freshman outfielder Zach Rodriguez (.413/.480/.688).

Rodriguez and Sprinkle lead the Big West in batting. Mortensen is second in the conference in home runs with eight, while Rodriguez is tied for third with seven. Rodriguez leads the league in RBIs with 39, and Sprinkle paces the Big West in stolen bases with 16. 

“I think we’ve really done a nice job offensively,” Checketts said. “Coach (Matt) Fonteno, who runs our offense, he’s done a magnificent job with these guys, and I think we’ve got a lot of guys that have performed a lot better than they did the year before, they’ve improved.”

A lot of this production has come, mind you, without the services of two of UCSB’s veteran leaders in the lineup in fifth-year senior shortstop McClain O’Connor and fourth-year junior infielder Marcos Castanon. 

Castanon in particular was playing like a conference player of the year candidate through the first 20 games of the season, hitting .373/.489/.667, and he is still among the league’s leaders in a number of counting categories despite not having played since March 27. 

The pitching staff has dealt with a similarly impactful injury with fourth-year junior lefthander Zach Torra having missed his last four starts, and that’s been part of the inconsistency on the pitching staff, but it doesn’t fully explain some of the struggles. 

The bullpen has been leaky, as Checketts describes it. The three top relief arms, righthanders Conner Dand (5.79 ERA, 18.2 IP), Conner Roberts (6.35 ERA, 17 IP) and Christopher Troye (4.22 ERA, 10.2 IP), have all had their issues this season, particularly with throwing strikes, as all three have walked at least 12 batters. 

And while there have been signs of progress from that unit in recent weeks, it’s still a work in progress, as evidenced by last Sunday’s game in the UC San Diego series. UCSB held a 3-2 lead at the seventh inning stretch, just three innings away from sweeping the series, but the Tritons scored five runs in the bottom of the seventh against four different UCSB pitchers in an inning that featured two walks, a hit by pitch and two wild pitches. 

“Our bullpen has been leaky, I think that’s a kind way to put it,” Checketts said. “(It) has underperformed our expectations based on the personnel we have down there. We thought we had that squared away going into this weekend, we definitely threw a lot more strikes the three weeks preceding up to this past weekend.

“This weekend, we regressed a little bit, didn’t throw enough strikes. Yesterday we had a 3-2 lead and had (three) free bases and two wild pitches.”

It’s important to note that the pitching output has only been a disappointment when compared to what we expected this pitching staff to be before the season after it collectively had a 1.84 ERA in the shortened 2020 campaign. 

Overall, it has still been good enough more often than not. At 3.93, it has the third-best team ERA in the Big West, its 10.58 strikeouts per nine innings are tops in the conference, and there have been bright spots. 

Lefthander Rodney Boone (7-1, 2.10) and righthander Michael McGreevy (5-0, 2.70) have been as good as advertised at the front of the rotation, and righthander Cory Lewis (4-1, 3.52) has done a nice job as both a starter and as a long reliever when UCSB has employed Troye as an opener the last two weekends. Lefthander Carter Benbrook (3.25 ERA, 27.2 IP) has also emerged as a reliable reliever, and while righthander J.D. Callahan’s numbers (6.59 ERA, 27.1 IP) don’t stand out, he’s been solid filling in the last four weeks for Torra. 

“The starting pitching and the bullpen the three weeks leading up to this past one really had started to settle in,” Checketts said. “Boone and McGreevy were playing well, Cory Lewis had thrown the ball well, and J.D. Callahan, who started a little bit for us last year and had some good starts and then had struggled out of the bullpen, he’s started the last four weekends since Torra has been out, and he’s given us good starts.” 

As successful as it has been in weathering the storm so far this season, UC Santa Barbara stands to get better moving forward. 

O’Connor, who has been fighting a pesky pulled hamstring since early March, is expected back in the next couple of weeks if he doesn’t have any additional setbacks. Castanon, who broke his hamate bone, got his cast off about 10 days ago, providing hope that he’ll be back before much longer, and Torra is also hoping to return in a matter of one or two weeks. 

The return of O’Connor and Castanon would give the lineup enviable depth, even if it might mean Checketts and his staff have to move guys around defensively to get everyone in the lineup, and having Torra back on the mound should help the pitching staff if for no other reason than it will slide everyone down one seat on the depth chart. 

It’s a pretty impressive feat all things considered. UC Santa Barbara has had arguably its two best returning position players miss significant time, along with last season’s most dominant starting pitcher. Its bullpen hasn’t been as effective as it was expected to be. By Checketts’ own admission, the team played pretty sloppy baseball for the first few weeks of the season. And yet, here it is competing for a Big West title all the same. 

La Salle Working on Storybook Ending

The schedule shows that La Salle is coming up on its last five weeks as a college baseball program, as the expiration date set by the preseason decision by the university administration to eliminate baseball draws ever closer. But with the way the team is playing right now, it looks like a squad determined to extend its stay by another week or two. 

First, let’s get all of the caveats out of the way because it’s easy to point them out. The Atlantic 10 split into two divisions this season, North and South, and La Salle plays in the softer North Division. It also has yet to play probably the best team in that division, Fordham, and that will continue to be the case until they face off in The Bronx in mid May. The Explorers also haven’t played a single team this season with an overall record above .500. 

All of that context, however, shouldn’t take away from La Salle’s 20-12 record and 6-2 start in A-10 play, which has it tied atop the North with St. Joseph’s. 

The 2019 La Salle team had 25 wins overall, the most for the Explorers since 2011, and this team is on pace to push well past that number, even as it plays a reduced number of contests in a schedule altered by Covid-19 limitations. 

For that matter, it looks like a virtual certainty that La Salle will be over .500 overall this season for the first time since it went 28-26 in 2011 and over .500 in conference play for the first time since it went 15-9 in 2013. 

But frankly, those milestones, while worth celebrating along the way, probably don’t have much currency for this team. The real prize is getting to play more games in the La Salle uniform and pushing the final game for the program out beyond the regular season finale on May 22. 

If the divisional format has perhaps kept some from taking La Salle’s success this season seriously, it has, at the very least, increased its chances of getting to play extra baseball at the A-10 Tournament. 

The conference is taking four teams, two from each division, to the tournament, which will be played at the campus site of the highest seed in the event. 

Fordham, St. Joseph’s and Rhode Island are the Explorers’ top competition to grab one of those two spots from the North, and you have to like the Explorers’ chances given what they’ve done so far. They’ve already split their only four games with URI this season and they’re two games ahead of the Rams in the standings. Even if you assume Fordham takes control of the division, La Salle has eight games remaining with St. Joe’s to determine which of those two teams has the edge. 

Once in the four-team event, with just three wins needed to clinch the auto bid, just about anything can happen, and La Salle is fairly well built to play well in that setting. 

The offense is solid, with a team .268 batting average and .376 on-base percentage, led by outfielder Nick DiVietro (.329/.505/.418), first baseman Ryan Guckin (.308/.366/.479), catcher/DH Tatem Levins (.285/.347/.446), outfielder Elijah Dickerson (.281/.370/.477) and spark plug center fielder Jack Cucinotta (.258/.419/.449, 17 SB). 

Perhaps more importantly, it has two workhorses at the front of the rotation in righthander Frank Elissalt (4-1, 3.78) and lefthander Colin Scanlon (4-2, 3.86). In a scenario where La Salle makes the A-10 tourney, if those two pitch like they have to this point of the season, the Explorers have to like their chances to play deep into the weekend. 

There is a lot of work still to be done to put La Salle in that kind of position, and 12 remaining games against Fordham and St. Joseph’s, the two teams it’s battling to get into the postseason, means it won’t be an easy road. But given the circumstances, simply being in position to extend the season a couple of weeks has to taste pretty sweet. 

A Tip of the Cap to New Mexico’s Ray Birmingham 

New Mexico coach Ray Birmingham announced on Sunday his retirement from coaching, effective at the end of the season, ending a 14-season run that stands as far and away the most successful period in the history of the program. 

To describe him as New Mexico’s Ray Birmingham is to say two things about the man. For one, and most obviously, he was the coach at the state’s largest university. But it’s also appropriate to think of him as belonging to the larger baseball community in the state. 

A native of Hobbs, N.M., Birmingham played his college baseball at New Mexico State and College of the Southwest, an NAIA school located in Hobbs. He began his career coaching high school baseball in Las Cruces and then spent two years at Southwest before beginning an 18-year tenure at New Mexico JC, highlighted by a national championship in 2005. After his time with the Lobos, he will retire as the winningest baseball coach in the state. 

The turnaround that he engineered at UNM is nothing short of amazing. When he took over, the Lobos hadn’t been to the NCAA postseason since 1962. He helped them there in 2010, his third season, and then took them back four more times in the next six seasons. 

Along the way, he’s also recruited and developed some impressive talent, including 2019 third-round pick Justin Slaten, now a righthander in the Rangers organization, and 2017 third-round pick Luis Gonzalez, who debuted in the outfield for the White Sox in 2020. The 2013 team alone had two future big leaguers in Twins catcher Mitch Garver and Mariners outfielder Sam Haggerty, plus a first-round pick in third baseman D.J. Peterson. 

Because New Mexico was his only Division I coaching stop, and that’s not a program that gets a lot of national attention, Birmingham doesn’t necessarily get mentioned among the top program builders in the profession, but he deserves that kind of recognition. There has often been a hipster quality to how his time at New Mexico is viewed. He was your favorite coach’s favorite coach for what he quietly accomplished and the way in which he accomplished it. 

In his remarks at the time of his announcement, Birmingham said that he’s a big believer in leaving something better than when you found it. That certainly applies to the New Mexico baseball program, and that’s a big part of why his shoes will be so tough for the next guy to fill. 

Birmingham clearly found a formula that worked for New Mexico, but it remains to be seen how replicable that formula will be for someone else, especially if it’s not someone as well-versed in baseball throughout the state. 

The relative geographic isolation does mean that it has a good shot to keep in-state prospects close to home, but it also means that it is a long way from any significant prep baseball hotbeds. And while Birmingham’s tireless fundraising did bring in the necessary cash to provide much-needed upgrades to Santa Ana Star Field, including a new locker room in 2016, the stadium itself remains relatively modest. 

Birmingham succeeded in spite of those things, fueled by a desire to do right by his home state, its home-grown baseball players and its flagship university. He knew exactly what the program was and what it wasn’t and how to find the right kind of players. In the end, it made him nothing short of a legend in the state and the best coach in the history of the New Mexico program.