The Gonzaga Bulldogs are in the NCAA tournament — and this time it has nothing to do with basketball.
The West Coast Conference champion Bulldogs play Georgia Southern today in their first appearance in the NCAA baseball tournament since 1981.
“I’ve always thought the Northwest has been underrated for years,” Gonzaga coach Mark Machtolf said. “Oregon State has woke everybody up a little bit and now this year with Washington State and us getting in, it just shows there (are) great baseball players in the Northwest.”
In fact, the Bulldogs will tell you they should have been in the tournament two years ago.
In 2007, it appeared Gonzaga was set to break its tourney drought when it won Game 1 of the WCC tournament. But San Diego rallied with 13-5 and 13-1 victories to capture the conference’s automatic bid and leave the Bulldogs disappointed when they weren’t selected as an at-large team despite a 33-25 record.
Gonzaga didn’t leave anything to chance this year. The Bulldogs wrapped up the WCC regular-season title by beating Loyola Marymount in the next-to-last conference game of the regular season, then swept the Lions in the conference tournament.
“We have eight seniors this year and we thought had a pretty solid team,” said WCC pitcher of the year Matt Fields, a Lake Stevens High School graduate. “We’ve had pretty good leadership this year, and a couple of the young guys stepped up.”
Fields has made things easy for the Bulldogs’ offense this season. In 13 starts, he’s 8-1 with a 2.86 earned-run average and two complete games. In WCC play, Fields was even more dominant, going 5-0 with a 2.81 ERA.
Unlike two years ago, when the Bulldogs mostly rode the arm of Clayton Mortensen to make a push for a postseason bid, Fields got plenty of help from Steven Ames, who was almost Fields’ match. Ames finished the regular season 8-1 with an ERA just slightly higher than Fields.
“We always had a few guys that could throw the ball but we were not as deep,” Fields said. “This year, the pitching stepped up. … The offense has always been there, the pitching has been the problem.”
The Gonzaga offense averaged nearly seven runs per game this season, which was plenty for a pitching staff ranked 20th in the country with a team ERA of 4.21.
Both those aspects will be tested by Georgia Southern, which ranked fourth in the country with 545 runs scored this season and a team batting average of .324.
Fields, who will start in today’s opener, plans to follow Machtolf’s preaching: despite the stage, the game hasn’t changed.
“The biggest thing is pitching with confidence,” Fields said. “Once you start changing things, that’s when it starts to go bad. I’m not going to vary anything from what I normally do.”
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