Tennessee Tech baseball team on power-driven streak

The longest active winning streak in Division I baseball belongs to a team from the Ohio Valley Conference that has only four NCAA tournament victories in program history.

The second-longest current streak belongs to a Big Ten school with one of the most identifiable brands in the country — but which has its own challenges to overcome on the diamond.

Tennessee Tech and Michigan don’t have much in common when it comes to college sports, but they can certainly relate at the moment. The Golden Eagles of Cookeville have slugged their way to 26 straight wins. The Wolverines of Ann Arbor have won 20 in a row, outpitching opponents in the cool northern air.

Both teams still have a way to go to match the Division I record of 34 straight wins, set by Texas in 1977 and Florida Atlantic in 1999. It’s a record Tennessee Tech coach Matt Bragga knows well because his teenage son reminds him.

“Our son, Luke, told me about three weeks ago (that it’s) 34 you’ve got to get to, “Bragga said. “But honestly, outside of our son Luke, who’s 13, I haven’t thought about it at all.”

As of Thursday, Tennessee Tech (35-5) had hit 33 more homers and had scored 80 more runs than any other team in the country. The Golden Eagles, who begin a three-game series against Southeast Missouri tonight, have averaged 11.4 runs per game and lead the nation in batting average (.357), on-base percentage (.454) and slugging percentage (.641).

No other program in the country has a slugging percentage higher than .525.

“We’re certainly not unathletic,” Bragga said. “I think a lot of people look at it and say, ‘Well, they probably have a bunch of trotters’ if they’ve never seen us before and they look at (the fact we’ve hit) 90-some home runs. We’re not.

We’re a very athletic team, but we love bat speed. We love guys who can elevate baseballs into the air and drive baseballs — maybe drive is a better word — drive baseballs out of the yard. We recruit to that and probably teach to that a little bit.”

Tennessee Tech is on pace to rank fourth in NCAA single-season history in homers per game, tied for fourth in runs per game and fifth in slugging percentage. Those statistics back up the confidence of a team that entered the season with sky-high expectations.

“We were shooting pretty high,” senior first baseman Chase Chambers said. “We were shooting for Omaha, if I’m being honest. Everybody here believes we can make it to Omaha, and it seems like we’re showing it.”

A College World Series appearance in Nebraska might seem like a stretch for a program that made just its fifth NCAA tournament appearance ever last season, but this team already has proved it’s capable of big things. No lead is safe against this lineup. In an April 1 game against Eastern Illinois, Tennessee Tech trailed 10-2 after five innings and won 26-11.

Tennessee Tech’s roster includes two junior right-handed pitchers from Cleveland, Tenn. — Bradley Central graduate Ty King and Zack Wilcox, who played at Walker Valley and Chattanooga State — and former Ringgold High School standout Devin Lancaster, a sophomore right-handed pitcher.

While Tennessee Tech has the nation’s most potent lineup, Michigan (24-11) has relied on pitching while bouncing back from a 4-11 start to move atop the Big Ten, a league that has made strides on the diamond the past few years.

When Erik Bakich took over as Michigan’s coach in 2012, the Big Ten was struggling to stay relevant in college baseball. A year earlier, the league put only one team in the NCAA tournament. There was talk that the conference should move its baseball schedule to the summer and perhaps give up on competing for NCAA titles in the sport.

Instead, the league has steadily improved. In 2013, Indiana became the first Big Ten member to play in the College World Series since Barry Larkin and Michigan made it in 1984. Last year, the conference put five teams in the NCAA tournament for the second time in three seasons.

“Midwest kids are recognizing that they don’t have to go south to get the baseball experience they want,” said Bakich, whose team begins a threegame series at Iowa tonight. “Kids outside of the Big Ten are recognizing that they can come to the Midwest and come to these Big Ten schools and get a great education and play baseball at the highest level.”

For all its resources, a school like Michigan still can’t control the local weather, which is often a concern for an outdoors sport that starts in February. This year, the Wolverines played their first 14 games in Florida, California and Tennessee.

When Michigan finally played its first home game March 14, it lost to Lawrence Tech, an NAIA school. Not long after that, Michigan made the NCAA national semifinals in both men’s basketball and hockey — the type of success the school is known for in so many sports.

The Wolverines haven’t lost a baseball game since then.

“A lot of this started,” Bakich said, “because we felt like we weren’t upholding really what Michigan and the block ‘M’ is all about.”