A look in the rearview mirror at Louisiana Tech’s 2024 baseball season (so far) from someone who’s been there …
(Editor’s Note: Odd circumstances put me on the road with the team and, despite that, the guys ended up winning Conference USA’s regular season title and survived a metaphorical fistfight to finish runner-up in the conference tournament last week. They bring a 45-15 record and want-to into Friday’s 7 p.m. scrap against Kansas State, 32-24, in the Fayetteville Regional.)
Tech’s 12-0 start included its first road game of the year, a 20 hits, 13 runs whupping of McNeese in Lake Charles in cold weather, and by “cold” we mean 47-below 0. With a wind blowing in from left. It was so cold I saw a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets.
The final part of trip was a championship at the three-day Battle at the Ballpark in Sugar Land, Texas, which was a semi-synopsis of the whole season, minus the losses.
- Tech beat Army, 4-0, scoring all the game’s runs in the eighth, the final pair on a homer by centerfielder Cole McConnell, who at that point in Tech’s 9-0 season had 4 doubles, 1 triple, 3 homers, 3 walks, 2 strikeouts — and 0 singles.
- Beat pain-in-the-ass Creighton, 12-0. Creighton’s voice carries, put it that way. The walk-off blow — a three-run, line-drive tater by Ethan Bates.
- Beat Air Force, 8-5, after trailing 5-0.
- Tech’s Bates was the DH and Reliever and MVP on the All-Tournament team — and was last week named the 2024 Most Outstanding Player in CUSA.
On the bus trip home, we started losing power near Grambling, regained it, limped off Interstate 20 and onto Tech Drive, and crawled to a stop at J.C. Love Field at Pat Patterson in the middle of the night. Without anyone knowing it, we’d just experienced the season in mini-form: some blowouts, some tight wins, and some flats that almost made you pull over.
And it was only the first week of March.
In Miami for three games, three guys went for separate walks and were attacked by the same bird on the same morning, a Hitchcockian affair we all witnessed on the team bus to the game that afternoon when the same bird at the same spot attacked some unsuspecting sap. Major laughs. And sadly, the highlight of the 1-2 trip.
There was the hotel where you had to turn in a Magic Ticket for breakfast, and the hotel in Arizona that was probably nice — 40 years ago. Someone was always misplacing a wallet or phone. Someone was always looking for a bottle of water.
There were enough 7 a.m. bus rides to make you feel you were in third grade again. These early-morning taxis were due mainly to early flights. One plane trip a season is about it for mid-majors; Tech had four. Miami. Arizona. New Mexico. Virginia. Flying a college baseball team commercial is like turning around a battleship. In molasses. In wintertime. (Or in Lake Charles in late February.)
Commercial air travel with college baseball is a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey affair, a circus without the elephants and straw. If you come home with almost as many people and almost as much equipment as you left with, it’s considered a very successful trip.
As any team will tell you, the non-baseball parts are common. The baseball parts are different. That’s why lots of teams aren’t playing this weekend, and 64, like Tech, are. They’ve been good at the baseball parts.
A lot of those 45 wins and the positive reaction to a couple of particularly hard-knocks losses has been because of how this team of Dogs has gotten along, adjusted and adapted during the non-baseball parts. Doubleheaders and time changes and Saturday and Sunday pre-noon games.
Life asks you to adapt, just as you would to a new arm out of the pen or an error or a bad hop — or a kamikaze bird or late plane or lost luggage. We adjust or we don’t.
It’s a group of teammates who look forward to getting to the ballpark. When they get there again this weekend — and they will, somehow, some way, to baseball-friendly Baum-Walker Stadium in Fayetteville — the baseball parts should be fun to watch. For sure, they’ve earned their way.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu