Oklahoma Baseball: Sooners’ No. 5 Seed in Big 12 Championship a Favorable One
By Chip Rouse
A brand new season starts this week for Oklahoma baseball as the Big 12 Championship gets underway at Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark in nearby Oklahoma City.
The Sooners come into the double-elimination, eight-team conference tournament as the No. 5 seed, which actually is a favorable draw for Oklahoma, especially considering who the Crimson and Cream would have been matched up against otherwise in the opening round on Wednesday.
Oklahoma (28-25-1, 11-13) and No. 4 West Virginia (33-21, 12-11) will get things started with a 9 a.m. game on Wednesday. The Sooners and Mountaineers are in the same side of the Bracket with top-seeded Texas Tech and No. 8 Kansas State. The winner of the game between OU and West Virginia will meet the winner of Texas Tech vs. K-State the following day, and the losers of those two opening-round contests will face off in an elimination game, also on Thursday.
The Sooners took two of three from West Virginia when they met in the regular season in Norman. The two teams have faced each other 13 times as members of the Big 12, with Oklahoma owning a one-game edge (7-6) in the series. They have played each other once in the conference tournament. The Sooners won that game 6-1 in an elimination contest in last year’s tournament.
Freshman right-hander Jake Irvin is the scheduled starter in the tournament curtain-opener with West Virginia. Irvin brings a season record of 6-1 and a 3.93 ERA into the contest in starts this season.
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The Mountaineers will counter with another freshman, right-hander Michael Grove, who pitched 8 1/3 innings in relief, holding the Sooners to four hits and no runs after OU had scored seven times in the opening inning of the final game in the series earlier in the season. The Mountaineers overcame a 7-2 first-inning deficit in that game and went on to post a 12-7 victory. Grove faced 26 Sooner hitters, striking out half of them, in recording the win. He is 2-4 for the year with an impressive 2.44 ERA.
The Sooners are led by junior shortstop and sometimes pitcher Sheldon Neuse, who leads the team in hitting with a .376 batting average and ranks in the top five in the league in a handful of other offensive categories, including a Big 12-best .672 slugging percentage. Neuse is the only OU position player hitting over .300. The Mountaineers, on the other hand, have four starters hitting .300 or better, led by third baseman Ivan Vera’s .407 season average and right fielder Darius Hill, who is hitting .348.
Oklahoma comes into the Big 12 Baseball Championship on a momentum swing to close out the regular season, winning eight of its last 11 games and six of the final eight series. As hot as the Sooners have been over the past month, however, West Virginia has been even hotter. Since winning the series finale over OU on April 24, the Mountaineers have won 13 of their last 16 games.
The Sooners were 4-5 against the teams on its side of the tournament bracket, going 2-1 against West Virginia and Kansas State, but 0-3 against conference champion Texas Tech.
Only eight of the nine Big 12 schools that participate in baseball qualify for the annual postseason conference tournament. This season, Kansas was the school on the outside looking in.
Oklahoma is one of only two schools that have made the championship field all 20 seasons the Big 12 has been in existence. The Sooners won the postseason tournament in 1997 and 2013.