Sun Belt gauntlet awaits Red Wolves

Arkansas State baseball Coach Tommy Raffo isn’t sugarcoating the challenge his team is about to face.

“There are 31 leagues in Division I baseball and we’ll be in the top five,” Raffo said Wednesday, putting the Sun Belt Conference behind some combination of the SEC, Pac-12, Big 12 and ACC. “Not a lot of people are going to want to hear this, but it’s a baseball league. … The type of baseball that’s being played with the type of coaches that are in this league, [it’s] unbelievable.”

Raffo’s Red Wolves were predicted to finish last of 14 teams that includes a consensus preseason top- 25 pick Southern Mississippi — new to the Sun Belt this spring — as well as returners Georgia Southern, Coastal Carolina, Louisiana-Lafayette and Texas State, all of whom reached the NCAA Tournament a year ago.

Add Old Dominion, one of last season’s first four out of the postseason, and that’s almost half of the league among the top 70 sides in 2022.

ASU wasn’t remotely close to that level, finishing last season 11-38 with a 5-24 record in Sun Belt games.

Raffo overhauled his roster, bringing in 22 newcomers to mesh with 15 returners, and it’s exemplified in the Red Wolves’ rotation.

Senior Tyler Jeans, a Texarkana native, will be the opening starter after shifting from the back of ASU’s rotation to a late-game relief role partway through the 2022 campaign. But he’ll be followed by junior-college transfers Hunter Draper and Austin Kapela — the former a craftier lefty and the latter a powerful righty.

Raffo said he is equally excited about his outfield, with junior- college transfers Allen Grier and Blake Burris battling a pair of in-state products, Cross Jumper (Jonesboro) and Kyler Carmack (Cabot), for one spot in center. The ASU coach indicated Burris is the likely favorite, but the others will combine with Jonesboro native Jake Henry Williams — a power-hitting junior-college transfer — to make up a defensive unit that Raffo expects to often “have the ball not touch grass.”

It’s all part of the roster upgrade that the Red Wolves knew was necessary, especially with their Sun Belt competition only getting stiffer.

“There was not a day that went by, including as we saw the season unfold last year, to where we [weren’t] trying to improve or upgrade every possible position,” Raffo said. “We had some very good players on the roster, but there were also some real minuses that we did not like and comparable to this league and what we need to do to win.”