Mizzou baseball eager to end offseason defined by COVID, cold weather
It’s been more than 11 months since Missouri last played a baseball game, its 2020 season abruptly cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet in at least one way, baseball season feels further away than ever. With snow blanketing the ground in Columbia and the entire Midwest experiencing sub-zero temperatures, the Tigers haven’t been able to practice outdoors in more than a week, head coach Steve Bieser noted in a Zoom press conference Monday morning.
But ready or not, the season will begin this week, as Missouri travels to Phoenix for a four-game series against Grand Canyon University starting Friday. Despite an unusual offseason, Bieser thinks his bunch is primed for a big year. The clear goal for the Tigers is to make an NCAA Tournament regional for the first time since 2012, but Bieser said his players haven’t been afraid to vocalize even more lofty aspirations.
“I wanted to eliminate the Omaha talk this year, and, you know, I had team captains that kind of talked me back into it,” Bieser said. “Well, that's kind of the ultimate goal. ... But that carrot’s hanging out there, the regional play. You know, we got to start there, and then we got to be able to work our way through there. And our conference prepares us better than any other conference to, if you can get into a regional, you've been through the battles, and you're set up to go all the way through there and get to Omaha.”
In order to enter a loaded SEC slate with realistic hopes of advancing beyond the conference tournament, Bieser will have to pull off a delicate balancing act during Missouri’s four weekends of non-conference play. On one hand, he acknowledged that he still needs to see how a lot of his players handle real live innings and at-bats, or even things like fielding in sunshine and wind. On the other, Missouri can’t afford to treat the first quarter of its schedule like the preseason if it wants to maintain a high enough RPI to advance to a regional. A start like last year’s would help. Missouri’s record stood at 11-5 with the Tigers having won seven straight games when all college sports were curtailed due to the emerging pandemic.
“Every game does count,” Bieser said. “We’ve found that we've come up one game short. We're going into our fifth season, it seems like for four years, there's one game in a schedule that you could pick out, if we’d have just won this game, maybe that puts us over the top and puts us into regional play. So we've got to be careful there with just trying to get guys experience or just playing them to give them experience.”
Both COVID-19 and the cold weather have made it difficult for Bieser to know exactly what he has on his roster on the eve of this season. Bieser said the Tigers have fared pretty well when it has come to avoiding the virus, but the team still had some positive tests and subsequent quarantines due to contact tracing disrupt practices both when players returned from campus to start classes in the fall and after winter break. The team wasn’t able to scrimmage other opponents during the fall. And lately, with the Midwest in the grips of a polar vortex, it has been virtually impossible to practice outdoors.
Practicing inside during January and February is nothing new to Missouri, but Bieser noted that doing so has been more difficult than ever this year. For one, the Tigers have an unusually large roster of 55 players. Four seniors from last year’s team took advantage of the NCAA’s decision to allow them to return with one more season of eligibility, and the staff still brought in 28 newcomers. That alone would make the logistics of indoor practices challenging, but social distancing protocols — trying to make sure one positive test doesn’t sideline an entire position group — have added another dimension.
Bieser said it’s been particularly tough to prepare his pitching staff. The team has formed a rotation where six pitchers practice with the team each day, while the rest go through individual workouts. As a result, Bieser said the team will be without “a couple arms that we would normally take with us this time of year” at Grand Canyon, and not many pitchers will stay on the field for more than three innings, at least early in the season.
“You know, college baseball, it starts way too soon for the northern teams,” he said. “To get your pitchers and expect your pitchers to be ready to go in mid February when you're a northern team, and dealing with this weather — because the one thing that our guys, our players haven't done, is they haven't been outside playing on a baseball field. Most of our stuff’s been in a controlled environment indoors. There's no wind, there's no sun to deal with, all those things that you would need to deal with to be completely ready.”
The lack of clarity on the mound is one reason Missouri’s Saturday doubleheaders against Grand Canyon this weekend and Nebraska-Omaha next weekend will each be nine-inning games rather than seven. Bieser said he pushed for the extra innings to try to make sure he can get as many players as possible onto the mound. He also said Tiger fans could expect to see some young arms contributing this season, specifically mentioning Zach Hise, Parker Wright, Holden Phelps and Ian Lohse.
“We've got a really good freshman class there that have just done an outstanding job, with Parker Wright and that group,” he said. “… They're going to get their two to three inning opportunities, and as they have a good two to three innings, then they get four or five, maybe, and just keep building off of that.”
The one aspect of the pitching group that won’t be a mystery: Missouri’s opening day starter. Bieser revealed to the team Monday that sophomore righthander Spencer Miles will take the mound Friday. The Columbia native appeared in four games and made two starts last season, recording a 3.60 ERA and 11 strikeouts in 15 innings.
Bieser also has a solid idea of who will form his nine-man lineup, and he spoke with optimism about the group. In seasons past, he said, Missouri has been missing consistency from its batting order, but Bieser said he feels good about his current lineup from top to bottom.
Look for seniors Mark Vierling and Brandt Belk to serve as stalwarts atop the Missouri lineup. Belk, a first-baseman who transferred to Missouri from Pepperdine prior to last season, was hitting an SEC-beat .457 when the season was curtailed. Bieser mentioned Luke Mann, Chad McDaniel, Andrew Keefer and Cameron Swanger as likely middle-of-the-order hitters. Keefer joined the Tigers as a transfer from UT-Arlington during the offseason. McDaniel, meanwhile, will serve as a designated hitter rather than the team’s everyday catcher, Bieser said. He will be replaced behind the plate by a combination of Tre Morris and Mike Coletta. While Bieser said he would generally prefer to have an everyday player at most positions rather than a platoon, he’s been impressed with the offense of both Morris and Coletta.
“They are tough outs in the lineup, and to have tough outs like that — and right now I'm thinking they're hitting towards the bottom of our lineup — that's exciting to have some really tough outs at the bottom of your lineup,” Bieser said. “That hasn't been the case here over the last couple years. We've been a little soft at the bottom. I think we're just a little bit deeper overall.”
Get 25% off your first year and a $75 Nike or adidas gift card with our holiday specials
Talk about this story and more in The Tigers' Lair
Make sure you're caught up on all the Tiger news and headlines
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for video and live streaming coverage