My son got on the mound for the first time in three weeks after missing time with a sore shoulder. He was working with a pitch count limit, and and he reached it with two outs in the fourth inning after living dangerously but not giving up any runs. I was happier that he was pain free than that he didn't give up any runs.
But the real story is the team. There's not a pro prospect on the team. If a scout is at one of our games, it means we're playing someone a lot better than us. Sizeable portions of the roster had no other D1 options or transferred in after being cut, hurt, or benched somewhere else. They were picked to finish last in their conference, which has been a fairly safe bet over the years. They are usually in the bottom 15% of D1 schools in terms of RPI. Since joining their current conference a decade or so ago, they have qualified for their own conference's tournament only once--and they went two and out that year. They have been to one NCAA regional--ever, and that was before any of these players were born.
One of the reasons my son picked this school was that he wanted to be part of building something and he believed the coach who said he was a big part of their turnaround plans.
It has been inspirational to watch this team transform over the past three years from a team that conditioned, practiced and played with the expectation that they would not be competitive . . . to a team that was semi-competitive on some weekends but still failed to execute in the crunch and still lost most of its games and all the ones that mattered . . . to a team whose players are now showing fight and having fun and finally seeing some payoff in their won-lost record.
After my son left today's game, his team scored a bunch of runs, then gave up a bunch of runs, but then scored some more and hung on to win the game, completing a sweep of a team that has historically owned them. This is a game they would have figured out how to lose not very long ago. In fact, they still do lose some games like this, but now we parents don't get that sinking feeling in the middle innings and know that disaster is about to strike. Now, sometimes our boys are the team that turns the double play with the bases loaded in the 8th inning of a one-run game instead of the team that can't get the tying run across. Now sometimes, it's our nine-hole hitter gets two-out RBI's in four straight close conference games and makes a difference in all of them. We are now the team that, when it gives up a lead, claws back to establish another one--or at least keeps fighting down to the last out.
If the season ended today, this group of rejects, cast-offs, rehab projects and strays would not only qualify for their conference tourney, but they would claim the second seed. They had never been above .500 at any point in any of the last five seasons (maybe longer--that's as far back as I checked), but they are now above .500 both in conference and overall. They were projected at one point this year to have a bottom 5% RPI, but today their RPI is in the top 50% of all D1 schools.
They haven't clinched anything yet. They're in a knot of teams bunched together well behind the first place team (which is the class of the conference and likely to be the conference's rep in the NCAA tourney), and they have two tough weekend series to go against teams vying for the same conference tourney slots. But even if they fall short of qualifying for the conference tournament, they have taken a big step forward and I've enjoyed watching them do it.
I feel great for the seniors who made the journey from awful to respectable and found a way to turn a miserable baseball situation into something they will be proud of the rest of their lives. And I'm also proud of my son, who believes his conditioning work ethic and on-field performance have contributed significantly to the cause.
