Pac-10 Race Heats Up
baseball April 21st. 2008, 10:37amWell, baseball fans, it looks like there’ll be a dogfight at the top of the Pac-10 this year, and it’s going to coincide with a fight for position at the top of the college baseball world. This week’s Baseball America Top-25 rankings just came out this morning. The most striking thing to note about the list? Four Pac-10 teams remain in the rankings, including a mini-comeback by preseason No. 1 UCLA (they check in at No. 23 after not being ranked last week). But the real drama comes in the top-10, with Stanford vaulting up from No. 10 to No. 5, a spot recently vacated by the Cal baseball team, which now checks in at No. 7, behind No. 6 Arizona State. The top three teams in the conference are now bunched together at the top of the national rankings. Hang on, folks, it’s going to be a helluva ride.
That 5-5 tie with the Cardinal that the Bears had to endure because of the lack of lights at Evans Diamond now looms larger than ever. There is no question that if Cal had won that game, it would be the one ahead in the rankings. But never fear, because the Bears will see their hated rival soon enough. But before that, Cal’s next conference series will be this weekend against the Sun Devils (31-6, 7-5 in the Pac-10), the second-place team in the conference and once-upon-a-time No. 1 team in the nation.
After that, the Bears come home to face another top pre-season team, Arizona (25-11, 6-6) over the weekend of May 2. From May 9-11, Cal will play one final series against Stanford (21-12-2, 8-4), currently first in the conference, at Sunken Diamond. The Bears will conclude the season with a three game set at Evand Diamond against the Bruins May 23-25. These are the days where champions are crowned, folks. The next four weeks are the most important four weeks any of these players have ever played through. They are facing the class of the conference, teams looking to secure playoff spots, teams looking to prove they were worthy of pre-season adoration and teams that are looking up at Cal for the first time in a while.
Luckily, two of those four series are at Evans Diamond. Unluckily, the two trips the Bears have to make are to Stanford and Tempe, Ariz. Let’s break down the numbers.
Cal is 16-4-2 at home. It’s 7-4 on the road. Slightly better winning percentage at home (.800) than on the road (.636), but both are still pretty remarkable. The Bears have lost only one series all year, and that was against a white-hot USC team. The important thing to remember is that Cal has not been swept, even when the pitching staff seemed to give up the ghost in Los Angeles. The Bears still came back to win a dramatic see-saw game on Sunday against the Trojans, and just yesterday, came back to win on a David Cooper walk-off single in the bottom of the ninth against Pac-10 foe Washington, the team with the lowest ERA in conference play. Against top-25 teams, Cal is 8-2-1.
There is one slight wrinkle in this, though, and that’s the Bears’ record at Sunken Diamond and Packard Stadium. Since 2004, Cal is 2-10 at Sunken, getting swept last season and in 2004. At Arizona State’s Packard, the Bears are 2-4 since 2004. That should be worrisome, especially because Cal pitchers are giving up a lot of contact against conference foes (they have a 1.83 WHIP - walks plus hits per inning pitched), and as head coach David Esquer says, Packard is a stadium that rewards contact, just like Dedeaux Field at USC. But, that being said, the Bears are still third in the conference in batting average in Pac-10 play. They’re hitting .294 in conference as a team, while the Cardinal are hitting .273 and the Sun Devils are hitting .304. Cal will be rewarded just as much as opposing offenses by playing in those parks if the Bears continue to play their game, which is to see a lot of pitches, get on via hits, walks and hit batters, to pressure the defense with speed and athleticism and to get runners on for Josh Satin and David Cooper, who have knocked in 30 percent of the Bears total runs on the year.
Cooper is especially good when the pressure mounts. As a freshman at Cal State Fullerton, he got a hit in seven straight College World Series at-bats, one shy of the CWS record. If Cooper continues to produce (and as long as the Earth keeps spinning the same direction, he should), and Satin continues to hit at his .408 clip, there is a very good chance that Cal can come out on top in both of the away series and potentially sweep the two remaining homestands.
Most signs point to the Bears being able to handle the added pressure, but remember, this is the Pac-10. Anything can happen. Stay tuned.
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