Champ Central
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Houston and East Carolina are meeting for the 2017 American Athletic Conference Baseball Championship Sunday.
The teams are hardly strangers to the postseason. They were picked as the top two teams in The American’s preseason coaches’ poll. And in fact, the 2015 final in The American Championship was between these very teams. East Carolina was the better team that day as the Pirates broke open what had been a 1-1 game with a five-run fifth inning on their way to a 9-1 win.
Although both teams find themselves in the same situation as they did two years ago - on the cusp of a conference title - their paths to get here have been decidedly different.
For Houston, this is familiar territory. The Cougars have played in The American final in each of the tournament’s four years of existence, and defeated Louisville to win the inaugural tournament in 2014. The Cougars were the favorite in 2015, when they won the regular-season title and had a comparatively easy time in their first three games of the tournament, outscoring their three opponents by a combined 32-10 margin before East Carolina held Houston’s bats in check.
The Cougars entered last year’s tournament as the No. 5 seed, but again rolled through the double-elimination bracket to win three games against higher-seeded teams, including a pair of victories against top-seeded Tulane. But again, the Houston lineup was stymied by a strong pitching performance as UConn claimed the 2016 crown.
In 2017, Houston was tabbed for second in The American’s preseason coaches poll, and the Cougars exceeded that projection by finishing tied with UCF atop the league standings. After taking one-run wins against Memphis and UConn in the first two games, the Cougars exploded for a 13-3 win against the Huskies in the semifinals and come into Sunday’s final hitting .288 as a team, good for second in The American.
“You want to get your kids to the point where, when it’s the postseason, they step it up and play a little better,” said Houston coach Todd Whitting. “We just have to go out and play the same game we’ve been playing all year.
For East Carolina, Sunday’s game represents a second chance for the Pirates to get where they expected to be all along. After claiming the conference tournament title in 2015, the Pirates entered the 2016 tournament as the No. 2 seed, but were eliminated after their first two games.
As it turned out, the layoff from the early exit allowed the Pirates to refocus on a thrilling run through the NCAA tournament as East Carolina won the Charlottesville Regional and stood one out away from advancing to the College World Series. The motivation to get back to the NCAA tournament, and finish the journey to Omaha, was front-and-center in the Pirates’ collective psyche entering the season.
But a rash of injuries and a slow start in conference play took their toll on the Pirates, who finished in eighth place in the standings, despite entering the season as the overwhelming favorite. Still, East Carolina brought The American’s top-hitting team (.292) into Clearwater, and the Pirate pitching staff has responded with big-time performances, including a shutout win against top-seeded UCF in the semifinals. The pitching numbers have been bolstered by a defensive unit that has delivered highlight-reel plays during the course of the Pirates’ stay in Clearwater.
“We’ve played really good defense, and we’ve done that for about the past month, which has been game-changing stuff,” said East Carolina coach Cliff Godwin.
The key for East Carolina, though, has been the Pirates’ ability to ignore the bumps they hit on the road to Clearwater and to keep their focus on the here and now.
“We’ve talked about being in the present moment, not looking behind us and not looking ahead," said Godwin. "We can’t think about ‘What if?’ we have to be where our feet are.”