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Bama News
The interesting mix of expectations for Alabama baseball
Alabama baseball opens the 2021 season Friday.
It’s been seven years since Alabama baseball made the NCAA tournament, five since playing in the SEC’s postseason.
Expectations, to be frank, haven’t been a rite of February around Sewell-Thomas Stadium so that’s what made this year interesting. Coach Brad Bohannon’s fourth Crimson Tide team has a taste of that hype … with a few caveats.
The 16-1 non-conference start to the pandemic-shortened 2020 season created a little buzz around the relatively dormant program. It was enough to crack a few pre-2021 rankings, peaking at No. 25 in the Baseball America version.
Three others had Alabama no lower than 30th but there’s a catch made clear when the SEC preseason poll was released.
And it dashed some cold water on that national chatter. Alabama was picked to finish last in the seven-team SEC West in a season that begins Friday against McNeese State.
Bohannon sees the humor in it all.
“Usually going into a season, you’re pissed about not being ranked or you’re pissed about or trying to rein the kids in because they’re ranked too high,” he said with a building laugh. “We’re kind of in between. For the first time, Alabama has some expectations by some people and we have some preseason rankings. And then you look at something else and another publication says that we suck.”
Also, the SEC West is stacked once again.
The division has four of the top nine teams in the coaches poll that had Alabama No. 30 and Texas A&M the only team below that.
No divisional team was lower than A&M at No. 33 in the NCBWA poll while Auburn at No. 37 was the lowest in Collegiate Baseball’s ranking that pegged the Tide at No. 27.
“The beauty of playing in the Southeastern Conference and especially in the West is it all takes care of itself,” Bohannon said. “You play 30 league games and if you win half or more, nobody can argue that you’re not one of the top 15 teams in the country. But it’s human nature to look at all that.”
Youth is also a factor for this version of the Tide.
The program lost 15 players from last year’s group including third-round draft pick Tyler Gentry. Six positional starters are back while Bohannon plans to try a few different pitchers in extended outings.
The opening weekend pitching rotation starts with Connor Prielipp (Friday), Antoine Jean (Saturday) and Dylan Smith (Sunday). Bohannon said they will use eight or nine different pitchers for extended outings early in the season to see how they respond. Chase Lee and Brock Guffey will see the high-leverage moments coming out of the bullpen.
Consistency will be the biggest concern early on.
“We still play like a team that has 19 freshmen on it and I think that’s probably a theme around college baseball,” Bohannon said. “Baseball is a game of repetition and we just haven’t played enough games in the last 10-11 months and we’re hopeful we can play cleaner, sooner.”
McNeese State comes to Tuscaloosa to open the season with a 3 p.m. CT Friday game. The Cowboys went 10-7 last season with a 12-4 win over Missouri and a split two-game series with Southern Miss. MSU received votes in the Collegiate Baseball rankings and was picked to finish second in the Southland Conference preseason poll.
The Tide plays 19 non-conference games before opening SEC play March 19 at Arkansas. Alabama navigated that pre-conference season nearly flawlessly in the ill-fated 2020 season and how it would’ve done after that will always remain a mystery.
Still, it was enough to generate some buzz around a program that has been in a decade-long slump. Now it’s a matter of living up to the talk in Year 4 of Bohannon’s program.
“This was a total rebuild when I got here in the summer of 2017,” Bohannon said, “so I understand there are a lot of people who want us to go out there and prove it before they dote on us and that’s certainly very logical. There are people who are familiar with our roster and know we have a lot of good players, so I don’t shy away from all that.”
