Mercer baseball aiming for SoCon title, NCAA bid

To Mercer head coach Craig Gibson, winning a regular season conference title is nothing to sneeze at. The Bears have done just that for the second year in a row in the Southern Conference.

Now, they’ll look to do something else that was pulled off last year — win the conference baseball tournament and earn another bid to the NCAA Tournament. Mercer opens tournament play Wednesday in Greenville, South Carolina, against The Citadel (17-40). The winner of that game will play against the winner of Furman and ETSU, with the loser of each respective game playing one another in the elimination bracket of the double-elimination tournament.

“For me, a regular-season championship means more than a tournament championship because you have had to do it for 15 weeks,” Gibson said. “To win a regular-season championship is different. Anybody can get hot and win four games in the tournament, and we know that to get the NCAA bid this year, we have to win the tournament. For us, the No. 1 seed means a lot — it shows how day in and day out we have handled adversity the whole year.”

At 35-21 overall, the Bears have indeed held serve the entire conference slate, going 16-8 and winning all but one three-game weekend series against SoCon opponents. And they have kept the pedal to the metal at the plate and on the mound, led in a big way by back-to-back SoCon Player of the Year Kyle Lewis. His team-best 17 homers have sparked the Bears to being second in the nation in the same category with 83. On the mound, Ryan Askew has been nearly unflappable against conference foes, going 5-0 with a 3.98 ERA.

Obviously, the Bears are happy to have a strong burst of momentum heading into a cluster of games that will decide their postseason fate.

“I think it helps. It’s the second part of your season, everybody is at game one. We’ve played well the last 15 games and are playing well right now,” Gibson said. “You’ve just got pitch well, play good defense and get timely hits. That’s generally what our club has done.”

Askew will get the start in the first game with Kevin Coulter (7-3, 4.81 ERA) on tap for the second game of the tournament. In a perfect world, both starters would pitch close to a complete game, preventing Mercer from having to dig deep into its bullpen for a tournament that will host its championship round Sunday.

Wednesday’s opponent for Mercer, The Citadel, will have no such luxury. The Bulldogs used two pitchers in 10 innings of work in Tuesday’s 3-2 win against VMI.

“It means a lot,” Gibson said of not using up a lot of pitching early. “If you can get a good start out of your No. 1 and get six or seven good innings, you can save your bullpen for later in the tournament. We’ll do all we can to win Game 1; I’ll throw ten guys if I have to.”

This story was originally published May 24, 2016 at 7:12 PM with the headline "Mercer baseball aiming for SoCon title, NCAA bid."