Season ends for Wichita State baseball with second straight loss at AAC tournament
For the 10th straight season, the Wichita State baseball team will miss the NCAA tournament.
Needing a deep run in the American Athletic Conference tournament this week in Clearwater, Florida, the Shockers were instead sent home after just two games following a 4-3 loss to Houston in an elimination game early Thursday at BayCare Ballpark.
The season began without many outside expectations, as WSU had moved on from former head coach Eric Wedge just two months before the start of the season. Loren Hibbs, a former assistant at WSU under Gene Stephenson with nearly three decades of head coaching experience at Charlotte, was promoted as the interim head coach and tasked with getting through the season.
The Shockers did more than that under Hibbs and his staff of Mike Pelfrey and Mike Siriani. They won at Oklahoma State and Kansas State for the first time in years. They swept a top-10 East Carolina team at Eck Stadium. Brock Rodden won the AAC Player of the Year award, WSU racked up all-conference selections and Hibbs was voted the Coach of the Year by his peers after guiding WSU to a third-place finish in the regular season.
But the Shockers sputtered at the end of the season, losing eight of their final 11 games to conclude a 30-25 season. Four of the final five losses came by a single run.
The team’s defensive shortcomings showed up at the worst time in an opening 10-6 loss to Memphis, as three errors and a handful of other mental mistakes accounted for five unearned runs in a game that ended close to 2 a.m. local time.
It was a missed opportunity for WSU, as the tournament bracket had opened up after the top two seeds, East Carolina and Houston, had both lost their first games. Even with the setback, the Shockers felt confident they had the starting pitching to survive the back-side of the bracket with Payton Tolle and Clark Candiotti still in the arsenal.
Another weather delay forced the Shockers to come back at 9 a.m. Thursday and their bats were silenced by Houston until the ninth inning. WSU rallied late, as Chuck Ingram and Rodden reached on singles, then Garrett Pennington hit a three-run home run to pull within one run with no one out. But Houston retired the next three hitters in a row to end the game.
In the end, there was little doubt Hibbs and his staff had overachieved. Not only did the players seem to rally around their new leader — not a single player or recruit left after the coaching change — but they had several promising moments this season.
But are Hibbs and this staff the permanent answer for the Shockers to return to the postseason? Their contracts are set to expire at the end of June with no indication yet of their fate moving forward.
It’s a difficult question that first-year WSU athletic director Kevin Saal will have to wrestle with in the coming days.
