The Tiger baseball team is looking to continue a tradition of winning in 2010. After a fourth-straight trip to the Gulf South Conference tournament and just missing a third-straight regional appearance in 2009, Head Coach Chris Moddelmog is confident in this year’s squad.
“We really like our chances this spring,” Moddelmog said. “We have a lot of new guys but we look for good things out of this club this year.”
The Tigers will be returning four starters on offense and five pitchers.
This season the Tigers will look to reload the team with promising junior college transfers and true freshmen after losing 12 seniors to graduation. One of those freshmen, pitcher Travis King, is eager to start working toward a tournament.
“I am looking forward to the experience of college baseball and being on a really good team,” King said. “I’m really looking forward to achieving our goal of winning the conference tournament and getting into the regional and making it to North Carolina in May.”
The Tigers opened the season with a four game series at Angelo State. The Tigers won the first game 4-3 but dropped the final three to Angelo.
Moddelmog was pleased with his team’s performance.
“The Angelo series showed us that we are not far from being a very solid club,” Moddelmog said. “They are one of the best teams in the country and had 19 seniors and we stayed right with them for all but the last inning of game four.”
Despite the rough start to the 2010 season, both Moddelmog and King have great faith in the reloading effort.
“The 2010 team will be very good defensively and will play extremely hard every time out,” Moddelmog said. “We will be solid on the mound and need to execute on offense to win games.”
King believes the replacement of 2009 talent is going to go smoothly and will allow the team to have success.
“Even though we don’t have a majority of returning guys, we have a chance to do really well,“ King said. “We play really good defense, and we going to pitch well this year. That is going to give our offense a chance to win a lot of games.”
However, there is still the question if this year’s team can go as far as teams the past few years. King however, thinks they have the potential to make a deep playoff run.
“This team has a lot of potential to go deep into the year,” King said. “We need to stay healthy, our pitching staff will need to give our offense the best chance it can at winning, and if we do that it will be exciting to be playing baseball in May.”
Moddelmog, for the moment, is more focused on improving the team throughout the regular season.
“We just want to improve each time out and be playing our best ball at the end of the season and anything can happen from there,” Moddelmog said.
The Tigers next action will be the home opener on Saturday against Kentucky Wesleyan at 2 p.m. The game against Central Missouri that was originally scheduled for Friday has been moved to Monday at 12 p.m. due to inclement weather predictions.
By Townsend Keller, Signal Writer
