Image credit:
Anthony Martinez (Photo courtesy of UC Irvine)
At the midpoint of the college baseball season, there was just one program in the country that ranked in the top 15 nationally in scoring (9.3 runs per game), ERA (3.87) and fielding percentage (.981).
That program wasn’t Arkansas or Texas A&M or Wake Forest, the three teams this year to rank No. 1 in the Top 25. It wasn’t Clemson, Florida State or Oregon State, powerhouses that have consistently this spring ranked in the top 10. Instead, it was UC Irvine, producing as one of the most complete and consistent programs in the country.
UCI has a rich tradition of its own, having reached the College World Series twice in the last 20 years (2007 and 2014) and won the Big West Conference twice in that same span (2009 and 2021). But the Anteaters have never started a season this well. They were 24-4 at the midpoint, the best mark in program history, and had just won a showdown series against UC Santa Barbara, which had been picked to win the conference in the preseason coaches poll.
The Anteaters were feeling good about themselves, but they know the job is far from finished.
“We want to see how good we can be,” coach Ben Orloff said. “I told our players it’s like in your class when you get an A on the midterm. You might want to coast and get a C on the final, but that’s not what we want to be about.”
UCI stumbled a bit in the aftermath of the series win against UCSB. It lost twice to Southern California and lost a series at UC San Diego, the reigning conference champion, to fall to 25-8 on the season.
The Anteaters didn’t need a reminder about how long and arduous the college baseball season is, but they got one anyway. Everything they want to do this season—win the conference, make the NCAA Tournament and compete for a national title in the College World Series—is still ahead of them. But for a program in the often-overlooked Big West, nothing can be taken for granted and everything must be earned.
No one is more familiar with that than UCI. A year ago, Orloff and the Anteaters were feeling good about their NCAA Tournament chances at the end of the season. Going into Selection Monday, they were 38-17, ranked 49th in RPI and riding a six-game winning streak. UCI made the cut in the final tournament projections from Baseball America (as the last team in) and D1 Baseball (as the third-to-last team in). The tournament bubble had tightened…