Comeback Cards: Louisville baseball ready for return to NCAA Tournament

Dan McDonnell likes to take a “playoff hockey” approach with his Louisville baseball team.

In college baseball, landing in the losers bracket of the NCAA Tournament is like an NHL Game 7, a win-or-go-home scenario, and that’s how McDonnell wants the Cardinals to view it.

This season, he didn’t wait until the postseason to drop that puck analogy. He took it out of ice in early May, with almost three weeks to play in the regular season.

“(Starting when) we went to Vanderbilt, we had a seven-game road stretch out of eight games,” McDonnell said Thursday as his team prepared to host Southeast Missouri State on Friday in the first game of the NCAA Tournament Louisville Regional. “So we felt like, OK, this is a good time to implement this. Let's start talking about playoff hockey.”

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There’s a reason McDonnell didn’t want to wait.

Unlike so many of his past Louisville teams, these Cardinals (38-18-1) have limited postseason experience on which to draw.

Louisville played in at least the regional round of the NCAA Tournament every year from 2012-19. But the COVID-19 pandemic canceled the 2020 season, and last season’s Cardinals missed the tournament field, finishing 28-22 and 16-16 in the ACC.

And though the Cardinals have some significant seniors — third baseman Ben Metzinger, left fielder Cameron Masterman and pitchers Jared Poland, Carter Lohman and Garrett Schmeltz among them — who reached the heights of the 2019 College World Series, there also are key players who haven’t so much seen the first weekend of the tournament.

It’s unusual for McDonnell, whose Louisville teams reached the NCAA Tournament every year from 2007-10 in addition to the 2012-19 run. The Cardinals have played in the super regional round eight times and the College World Series five times.

And it struck McDonnell this winter that he had a different sort of roster this season. He had a conversation with closer Michael Prosecky — then entering his junior season at U of L — in which Prosecky stressed he’d yet to play in the NCAAs.

“It was like, wow,” McDonnell said. “I’ve got three classes of student-athletes here who haven’t experienced the postseason.”

So McDonnell has tweaked his approach.

He brought up the playoff hockey analogy earlier, calling that stretch with seven of eight games on the road “a little mini postseason.” Louisville went 4-3-1 over that span.

Even before the season started, Masterman said, Louisville had a different look, focusing more on fundamentals in an effort to put the program back on track after last year’s postseason absence.

“We really just went back to the basics and really worked on our fundamentals over the offseason and put our heads down and went to work,” Masterman said. “It's a staple in this program to make for the postseason, and we wanted to get back to it. And now we're ready to show out.”

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The Cards’ spotlight time starts Friday at 2 p.m. against Southeast Missouri State, a team that McDonnell said has some balance to its lineup — four sluggers and a host of players down the lineup who will sacrifice runners over and steal bases.

It’s the first test in what shapes up to be a high-scoring regional. Louisville is 12th in Division I scoring at 8.7 runs per game; Michigan 12th at 8.1; and Oregon and SEMO tied at 63rd at 7.3.

McDonnell is hoping his team is ready for it.

Though he’s careful not to come across as “dogging last year’s group,” McDonnell said this is a closer team by design.

“Connection is such a big part of this group, and they were intentional about it,” he said. “All the restrictions and things we weren't able to do last year (because of COVID) affected a group that's built on trust, that's built on love. And that can only happen when you spend a lot of time together.”

And McDonnell believes he and his staff “did a better job coaching,” of using the Cardinals pitching staff and preparing hitters for late-game adversity.

He’s stressed the importance of energy entering the postseason. He’s talked about playoff hockey. He’s hammered home the significance of defense, reminding his players of the dangers of allowing extra at-bats to potent postseason lineups.

But the truth, McDonnell said, is that at this point in the season, all the motivational levers he pulls might not matter much.

“The challenge is, you’re facing 63 of the other best teams in the country,” he said. “So just because you do everything right doesn't mean it's gonna go in your favor. This is college baseball, and there's a lot of parity, a lot of good teams.”

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: NCAA Tournament: Louisville baseball ready for postseason return