By Kenny Barto
After eight long months and a harsh northeast winter that yielded some five feet of snow around the central Connecticut area, the beginning of March means one thing to some: the start of baseball season.
“It’s been a long offseason,” said CCSU Head Coach Charlie Hickey. “But, it’s nice to get started and get things going again.”
CCSU’s season ended in June after two losses in the NCAA regional tournament in Norwich, Conn. The Blue Devils were beaten by Florida State 11-3 followed by a 25-5 shellacking by UConn.
The Blue Devils lost nine players to graduation, including major contributors Sean Allaire, Tommy Meade, Richie Tri and Kyle Zarotney. However, Coach Hickey has replaced the nine departures with twelve new freshmen and two transfers.
“One of the redshirt freshmen, Anthony Turgeon, will come in right away and he will be asked to play shortstop and bat early in the lineup,” Hickey said. “He was capable of playing last year but since we had such a dominant group in the infield, we redshirted him. I’d like to compare him to Sean Allaire, so he’s going to be asked to be a major contributor right away.”
Allaire, an all-region and third team All-American selection, led the team by batting .426 with 73 RBI and 65 runs scored. With Turgeon being compared to Allaire, his next four years of eligibility will be key to making the Blue Devils a team to be reckoned with.
In the preseason coaches’ poll, CCSU was picked to finish first in the Northeast Conference, setting the bar high for the upcoming year.
“If you look at every other conference, most are an exact replica of how teams finished last year,” said Hickey. “It’s something that over the course of the last 10 years we have been there, so it’s not anything that scares me and I know it doesn’t mean anything. But, it’s also where our expectations are and that we’re going to be able to compete at the top of the conference.”
CCSU only received two first-place votes in the coaches’ poll, but received the most overall points out of every other team. Monmouth received four first-place votes, but finished second, followed by third-place Bryant, who received three first-place votes.
Bryant won the regular season title last year but was unable to compete in the NEC tournament because it was not a full-fledged member.
“At the end of the day, we’re going to be staring at Monmouth, we’re going to be staring at Wagner and Sacred Heart has always been consistent,” Hickey said. “Also, there’s no way Quinnipiac isn’t going to contend, they have too many good players and have had too many down years.”
New to the 2011 NCAA Division 1 season is the new Bat-Ball Coefficient of Restitution standard for baseball bats. This new standard controls the “bounciness” of when the bat hits the ball to the point of where the new composite metal bats will perform similar to wooden bats.
In 2010, CCSU hit 70 home runs as a team, which more than doubled their total from 2009. Even though Coach Hickey blames this on the warm breezy days, he seems to have a feeling that the production will be down from last year.
“We got our hands on one of the new bats in the fall, but we really didn’t have a chance to hit it outside much and still haven’t had that chance,” said Hickey. “I don’t know if it’s the talk that it hasn’t been that good, but I tend to believe that we won’t rely on the homerun as much as we did last year, even though I haven’t heard anything that bad from games being played this week.”
It’s vital for CCSU to take things one game at a time, which is very familiar to Coach Hickey since the only two pitchers who had set spots in the rotation last year were Meade and Dave Krasnowiecki.
“What we are going to try to do is piecemealing some things and doing some platooning,” said Hickey. “We’ll also be looking at other options later in the game that we shied away from last year, whether it be pinch runners or defensive replacements.”
Krasnowiecki will lead the pitching rotation in his last year of eligibility after going 7-3 last season with a 4.84 ERA. The southpaw joined the Blue Devils last season from Community College of Rhode Island and immediately made an impact.
“Dave is someone who pitched on the weekend for us last year and also got a start for us against Florida State in the regional, so there’s a lot of experience there that’s going to be relied on,” Hickey said. “We’re hoping to stabilize the pitching a lot better than last year. I don’t know if we got better last year on the mound, but I just like to say that we kept reshuffling the deck, which we want to avoid this year.”
The lineup for CCSU has a lot of question marks, but there is one solid part, and that’s the clutch bat of Pat Epps. Epps was second on the team in batting average last season hitting .418, and led the team with 18 home runs, a total that broke Jamie Palmese’s record of 16 in 1997.
“A lot of what we do with the lineup will be surrounding Pat Epps,” Hickey said. “He’s someone who’s batted in the middle of the lineup his whole life, so I’m not worried about him. But a lot of the lineups that had success in past years had a lot to do with who hit in front or in back of a guy, so it’s going to be something we’re going to pay a lot of attention to.”
It’s going to be an interesting season for CCSU baseball. Being picked first in the NEC is a tough spot to be put in, but the Blue Devils have the talent to put up a decent record this year.
As long as the Blue Devils aren’t bitten by injury and stay consistent, CCSU should compete for another NEC title in 2011. The Blue Devils open up this weekend at Navy for the second consecutive year.
CCSU will not make an appearance at home until March 15th against in-state opponent Yale.