Cal Poly baseball faces most important week yet

Why is this the most important week thus far for the Cal Poly Mustangs? Let me count the ways:

Shortstop, Peter VanGansen always seems to be on base for Cal Poly. By Owen Main

The Big West Title

The Big West Conference doesn’t have a baseball tournament. Instead, the winner of the regular season gets the automatic bid. Right now, the frontrunner is not Cal Poly, it’s UC Irvine.

The Anteaters will visit Baggett Stadium this weekend for the final three regular season home games for Cal Poly. A sweep puts Cal Poly in the driver’s seat for the conference title. A series win gets them well-into the race. A series loss to the Anteaters would make Irvine strong favorites to hold-on during the last few weeks of the title.

Revenge

Cal Poly has one mid-week game loss this season. It was last week. To Pepperdine. This week, the Mustangs have a chance to even things up with the Waves.

Last week, Pepperdine, who had a bye over the weekend, threw their ace pitcher against Cal Poly in an attempt to get their five-game week off to a good start. They beat Cal Poly, but proceeded to lose their next three games to Long Beach State and Loyola Marymount. The Waves did salvage one game against LMU and are looking to beat Cal Poly for the second week in a row.

Cal Poly snapped a four-game losing streak in winning the last two games of their series at UC Riverside last week. They’ll be looking for payback on Tuesday.

Regional Hosts

Cal Poly is all but locked-in to host a regional on the West Coast. I suppose they could lose most of the rest of their games and find themselves bumped, but if the prevailing wisdom is correct, they’ll at least take care of business enough to host a regional. What is more in question at this point is whether they’ll be a national seed going into the NCAA Tournament.

A National Seed

Losing the Big West Conference, or even this upcoming series to UC Irvine could cost Cal Poly a top-eight national seed. National seeds not only get to host Regionals, but are also automatic Super Regional hosts should they advance.

Cal Poly isn’t counting their chickens yet, and neither should their fans, but the road to Omaha is made slightly easier by taking care of business and earning a top-eight seed. Currently, Cal Poly is ranked as high as fifth and as low as eleventh in five major polls. A sweep of Irvine or 3-1 week could make that top-eight ranking and national seed more of a possibility.

The return of Mark Mathias this past weekend could go a long way toward getting the Mustangs back in an offensive rhythm. Cal Poly also hopes that Matt Imhof, coming off his worst performance of the season in Riverside, also gets back into a groove back at Baggett Stadium.