Stags book best start in program history
Team may have benefited from book club during lost season
Without a regular season last spring due to the pandemic, the Fairfield University baseball team hosted a team book club.
Players and coaches met once every week to discuss former MLB sports psychologist Ken Ravizza’s “Heads up Baseball: Playing the Game One Pitch at a Time.” Not only did it help connect the players throughout the overwhelming year that was 2020, it helped launch a new mindset for the Stags moving forward.
And now, almost three weeks into the 2021 season, that new mindset of appreciating team depth and not getting caught up in results has propelled Fairfield to its best start in program history at 8-0. And with a doubleheader against Quinnipiac on Wednesday, the team is in position to set the program’s win-streak record as well.
“Everyone just wants to be back out here and playing,” sixth-year Stag and right-hand pitcher John Signore said. “You work up to the season last year and you only play however many games and then it gets cut short, the anxiety and anx
iousness of getting back out on the field, especially in that first series, just the excitement level, the energy levels, everyone is screaming 24/7 during the entire game. It’s really crazy.”
With the team’s weekend pitching starters from last season all returning this year thanks to the NCAA’s extra year of eligibility, the Stags have been able to rely on a strong depth in experience and talent in their pitching corps. Over the course of the season’s first eight games, the Stags have collectively recorded a 1.97 ERA and held opponents to an average of just 2.1 runs per game.
For Signore, a former starting pitcher for Xavier High School who helped the Falcons win the 2014 SCC championship, he’s noticed the book club in the spring helped shift players’ attitudes when it comes to putting the team’s success over their own, especially when having to be relieved on the mound during a game.
“Now it’s more of a mindset of less feeling bad and more appreciating how good the guy that is coming behind you is gonna do,” he said. “It’s very obvious from guy A to guy Z, it doesn’t matter who is on the mound, they’re going to get the job done.”
Fairfield has used 12 pitchers thus far this season.
Offensively, the Stags have been just as dominant, as the team has outscored opponents by an average of 5.25 runs per game.
Junior Justin Guerrera highlights the Stags’ lineup with a team-leading six home runs, 15 RBIs and a .467 batting average. The second baseman, who was named Collegiate Baseball’s national player of the week after hitting three home runs in Fairfield’s 13-4 win over Canisius on March 20, said he’s approached this season with a new mentality of playing one game at a time. Not focusing too much on each at-bat — something he learned from reading Ravizza’s book.
“He’s a perfectionist,” Fairfield coach Bill Currier said. “He wants to be as good as he can be in every area, which every good athlete does, it’s just how they handle it if it doesn’t go their way 100 percent of the time. In baseball, it doesn’t quite a bit, and you gotta be able to deal with it, and he’s becoming more mature and understanding that.”
Fairfield is on a ninegame win streak dating back to last March and continuing through sweeping fourgame series against Canisius and Iona to open this season. The Stags are one win away from tying the program’s win-streak record of 10 games, set in 1972. Fairfield plays host to Quinnipiac in a doubleheader Wednesday starting at noon.
While the record would redefine program history for Fairfield, the Stags are aiming for higher goals this season.
“Every aspect of our game has just gotten exponentially better compared to years prior,” Guerrera said. “We’ve been executing way better than we have been in the past and everything is kinda clicking well for us right now … That record is definitely in the back of our minds but it’s not in the forefront. We’re trying to work for something bigger, working for that MAAC championship and getting that bid into the (NCAA) regional.”