Hatters ready for spotlight
Stetson is eager to show off elite pitching, win
DELAND – The Stetson baseball team is ready for its close-up.
The Hatters have been on the NCAA Tournament stage 19 times before, but always as more of a side attraction than the main event. That ends Friday as Stetson will host an NCAA regional for the first time in program history. The extra attention has been appreciated.
“Everybody loves fame. Everybody wants to be in the spotlight,” senior catcher Austin Hale said. “Kind of getting this fame now is really good for the program.”
The fame has been earned. The Hatters’ 45 wins are the third-most in the country. They took home the Atlantic Sun’s regular season and tournament championships. And they boast possibly the best pitching staff in college baseball. Led by first-team All-Americans Logan Gilbert and Brooks Wilson, Stetson’s 2.58 team ERA sits atop the national leaderboard.
“We’re giving up only 2.6 runs per game. That’s absurd,” Hale said.
Gilbert is the ace of the rotation and may be a top-10 pick in the MLB Draft on Monday. But he won’t be on the mound Friday against the Hartford Hawks. That start will instead go to junior Joey Gonzalez, while Gilbert will pitch Saturday versus either second-seeded USF or third-seeded Oklahoma State.
There isn’t much of a dropoff from Gilbert to Gonzalez, who leads the team with a 1.77 ERA. Friday will mark just his second weekend start of the year, but Gonzalez has been tested by facing and defeating tournament teams such as USF and Florida State.
“Sometimes, our midweek games are just as tough [as conference games,]” Stetson coach Steve Trimper said. “Joey has been at the brunt of that this year. He’s beat some really good teams, so we felt like it would give us the best chance to win the [regional] by having him go Game 1 and then bring Logan into Game 2.”
The parade of premier pitchers in this regional doesn’t begin and end with the Hatters. The Bulls will be bringing Shane McClanahan, another early-firstround talent, to DeLand. Although McClanahan has a losing record and a modest 3.41 ERA, opposing batters are hitting just .181 against him, and the junior is averaging 14.76 strikeouts per nine innings, the No. 1 rate in the nation.
The Cowboys will probably take their first cuts of the tournament against McClanahan and are trying to make the best of a second chance. OSU has lost nine of its last 10 games, but it is still in the running for a championship after the tournament selection committee made the Cowboys one of the last four teams in the field of 64.
“The way we played the last three or four weeks weeks of the season ... we're very fortunate to be here,” Cowboys catcher Colin Simpson said. “If we can get back to the way we played in the midseason form, I think we could be the darkhorse of the tournament.”
Stetson and Hartford have never played one another, but there is plenty of familiarity between the two head coaches. Before donning Stetson green in 2016, Trimper spent 11 seasons at the helm of the Maine Black Bears. From 2012-16, he battled against Hawks head coach Justin Blood in the America East Conference. Now, Blood and Trimper will meet again with much more at stake.
When asked if he sees a common thread between Trimper’s Stetson team and the ones he coached at Maine, Blood said, “Starting pitching, very important. He trusts his starters. He expects them to get deep into games.”
That pitching will determine how long the Hatters get to stand in this spotlight.