C’mon now, LSUS baseball; isn’t this getting a little bit ridiculous?
The more you keep looking at the Pilots’ record, the more you think somebody must have the digits in the wrong order.
Surely it must be 40-8, because it certainly could not be 48-0. (Even 40-8 would be a better winning percentage than any Major League Baseball team in the history of Major League Baseball … by a lot.)
In a sport where winning two out of three games in a series is considered great, the Pilots have been winning three out of three. All the time.
The Colorado Rockies haven’t won two games in a row all year long. The LSUS Pilots have won 48 in a row.
Does. Not. Compute.
Speaking of the Rockies, there’s a real good chance they won’t win 48 games all year and they play 162 of them. The Pilots only needed 48 games to win 48 of them.
Forty-seven of those wins came in the regular season. The Red River Athletic Conference Tournament opened Thursday and the Pilots have already started making a mockery of that as well (after going 30-0 in the RRAC this season).
They won 10-0 in the opener in seven innings. Of course they did.
LSUS has won 22 games this season in which the Pilots did not have to play a complete nine-inning game. They call that the Mercy Rule, but that’s a misnomer for the No. 1-ranked Pilots because they have rarely shown any.
The old saying “that’s baseball” gets thrown around a lot in the sport, mainly to say that sometimes there’s no explaining why one team unexpectedly wins a game against a far superior team. Former pitcher Joaquin Andujar once famously said he could sum this phenomenon up in one word – “youneverknow.”
Well, here’s something we do know, Joaquin. LSUS still hasn’t lost a game.
Somewhere along the line, things were bound to have gone wrong. Bad bounce here, a bloop falls in there and next thing you know, a batter will run into one for a three-run homer. That’s all well and good, except that you need a lot of three-run homers to beat this bunch.
But if you think giving up three runs is going to beat this team, think again. LSUS has scored at least three runs in all but one game.
The biggest display of carnage came in the final week of March, when the Pilots beat Texas College 37-0, 15-0 and 42-4. None of those are misprints. In the last of those games, the Pilots put up a 16-spot in the first inning and then added another 15 in the fourth inning for good measure.
But don’t get the impression that this undefeated season has been a cakewalk. There was a 2-0 game on April 19 against Houston-Victoria and a 5-4 win over Louisiana Christian on March 1 in which the Pilots scored two runs in the final inning.
LSUS will play Our Lady of the Lake University in the RRAC Tournament in the next round today, but considering that LSUS has won three previous games against OLLU by a combined 20-3, the opponents might feel like jumping in the lake when it’s all said and done.
The Pilots will host an NAIA Regional next week for the fourth straight year to try to advance to the NAIA World Series later this month. As the No. 1 team in the country, they’ll certainly be considered the favorite.
But the job at hand is not to win them all. Just the last one.
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com