Mercer baseball atop SoCon standings as final series looms

The Mercer baseball team shattered records over the weekend and put itself in position to have its best regular season finish in nearly a decade.

The Bears swept the VMI Keydets at home, vaulting Mercer into a tie for first place in the Southern Conference with Western Carolina. Mercer is now 39-13 on the season overall and 12-6 in conference play. 

A series against East Tennessee State on the road this weekend — and Western Carolina’s series against seventh-place UNC-Greensboro at home — will decide if Mercer can snag the regular season SoCon championship for the first time since 2017. That comes after a midweek matchup with Georgia Tech, the No. 3 team in the D1Baseball.com poll, on Tuesday.

“The chemistry and camaraderie is there,” head coach Craig Gibson said Monday. “It’s a smart group of guys, it’s hard not to know what position we’re in and what we have in front of us. I told ‘em: ‘Very few times in life can you control your destiny. We’re just trying to go 1-0. At the end of the day, if it doesn’t happen, you don’t have anybody to blame but yourself.’”

The three-game sweep of VMI was a dominant one — Mercer won 13-2, 5-2 and 11-1 — that continues an incredible run for the Bears, who are 14-1 dating back to April 17. 

“I think we’re on a pretty good run,” Gibson said. “It all starts with the pitching, for sure. We’ve really limited the free bases we’re giving up — not giving up too many walks, not hitting batters, that’s been key for us.”

The hot stretch also gave Mercer a 29-2 record at home this season, the best such finish in program history.

“I don’t talk about records and stuff like that much, but oh, man. It’s incredible. I told the guys, ‘When you’re 50 and I’m 120, I still don’t think anyone will break that record,’” Gibson said. “The crazy part is, I really think we could have been 30-1. One of those losses, we had some missed opportunities.”

The streak, broken up only by one measly loss to Samford on the road the first weekend of May, was a necessary one for Mercer after it was swept by Western Carolina and lost to Kennesaw State for a four-game skid.

The head coach thinks much of that rapid in-season pitching improvement comes thanks to pitching coach Kade McClure, who was hired in December after the Bears’ previous pitching coach got a job in the Seattle Mariners system.

McClure is settled in now, Gibson said, and really starting to understand the pitching staff after coming on late in January.

Frontline starter Garrett Lambert has led that charge with a 3.79 ERA on the season and 75 strikeouts in 61 ⅔ innings pitched. He’s lowered that ERA by more than a run in four stellar starts since mid-April. Saturday pitcher Miguel Hugas has also found some success, including two seven-inning efforts against conference opponents VMI and Wofford.

The bullpen has risen to the challenge as well. Jess Ackerman won the SoCon’s Pitcher of the Week Award on Monday after tossing nine shutout innings across three games from May 3 to May 10.

That’s to say nothing of the hitters. Mercer has an OPS of 1.026 as a team, which leads the conference by more than .120. The Bears also have a batting average of .320, more than .20 points higher than any other SoCon squad. Before the weekend series, Mercer had 102 home runs, the third most in the country. Now they have 114.

“The challenge is getting all nine guys going at the same time and playing at a high level with consistency. You get three or four guys going and you might get five runs, you get six or seven and you might score 10 runs,” Gibson said. “The one thing we’ve focused on this year that’s really worked is bat-to-ball skills, finding guys that make more contact.”

That approach has led to baserunners, and the Bears have not had to sacrifice the longball to boot.

Titan Kamaka still leads Mercer with a .416 batting average while playing standout defense at shortstop. Braydon Kersey leads the team with 20 long balls — and he occasionally pitches for the Bears, too. Chris Katz has slugged his way to 18 home runs and a team-best 1.255 OPS. He’s closely followed by Eli Stephens and Logan Shepherd, who each have 17 homers.

“It’s a total group effort. They’re all just great guys, super unselfish,” Gibson said. “When you have everyone going, it’s hard to stop. It’s a fun time to be on the bus with these guys right now.”

Mercer will keep its standard pitching rotation in place for its series with ETSU despite Tuesday’s game against the Yellow Jackets, meaning Lambert and a resurgent Hugas will pitch Friday and Saturday, respectively.

Though they are tied for first, the Bears could slip depending on other conference results this weekend. Wofford closely trails mercer with an 11-7 record in SoCon play, while ETSU and Samford are tied at 10-7.