Commentary: Hopes of student body pressure baseball team

By Casey Michel     3/25/10 7:00pm

The baseball team knows pressure. They know the feeling of impossible expectations, the weight of heady predecessors and a legendary legacy. They've been beaten and broken and embarrassed, and had to dealt with the ramifications in kind. But they've never known pressure like this.

Because even though we're only one-third through the season, and Omaha is still a world away, the team currently has more pressure on its shoulders than does any other entity with Rice stationery. More than President Leebron. More than those manhandling the endowment. More than the new masters at Duncan and McMurtry. More than anyone.

Now, before you scoff at the argument, there's no need to remind me of the triviality of organized sports. I get this. There's an inherent pointlessness to tossing a ball, or sprinting back on defense, or trucking a receiver out of bounds. Too much money is wrapped up in something that neither expands learning nor bumps up our rankings, and as a university in the upper crust of educational e d i f i c a t i o n , shouldn't that be our goal?

---

---

Well, sure. But whereas I would usually cite the character-building and life lessons intrinsic to sport, I'm going to go a different route and point out that sports - above rankings, above revenue, above the width of Leebron's grin - are perhaps the best barometer for a community's wherewithal.

There may be no better measurement for how far a town has tumbled, or how high a people have risen, than sport. And Rice is no different.

Take a look at everything hammering our school over the last year. The endowment shrank quicker than Mark McGwire's credibility, to the tune of approximately $1 billion. Rice and Baylor College of Medicine seemed destined to grow old with one another, only to find cold feet as merger talks grew more serious. Meanwhile, infighting arose within the new and not-so-sparkling colleges, and intellectual borders have begun imploding, with the decision to cut long-standing classes recently putting our entire institution's purpose in an unfavorable light.

But you don't see students moping about the loss of administrators' bonuses or the avoidance of a noxious influx of pre-meds; rather, students mope because our athletics programs have done little but mirror the sorrows and struggles the university has suffered.

And it is because of this free fall that it rests on the baseball team to salvage a year destined to go down as one of the worst in Rice's history, athletics or otherwise.

Take a look at how far we've fallen in only a matter of months. In early 2009, Head Football Coach David Bailiff hoisted a Texas Bowl trophy under a cobalt Houston sky. Fifteen months later and already on his third offensive coordinator, Bailiff, whose squad is coming off a two-win season and a return to ESPN's Bottom 10, is inundated with questions about whether he can only win with players other coaches recruit.

Likewise, Head Men's Basketball Coach Ben Braun's honeymoon came crashing around him like one of freshman forward Arsalan Kazemi's thundering dunks, seemingly the lone bright spot of a 1-15 conference campaign. And on the women's side, the Owls got off to their worst start in the program's history - sure, they made it interesting toward the end of the season, but a first-round exit from the conference tourney cemented a season worth sleeping through.

But all of these performance-based slips take a backseat when compared to the biggest loss of the year: that of former Athletic Director Chris Del Conte, the maestro of moneymaking and the stalwart of slickness, who is now steering Texas Christian University toward a bid to join a BCS conference. He's gone, and so are all the promises of a bright future for Rice athletics he took with him.

As you can see, it's been a heinous, horrid year for Rice athletics, serving only to highlight a heinous, horrid year for the university. And up until now, the baseball team has done nothing to make us think they'll be any different. Texas took the season series. Conference USA is shaping up to be the strongest we've ever seen. A 12-10 record might be acceptable at a lesser school, but somewhere, Head Coach Wayne Graham is seething.

Fortunately, there's still time to turn it around. Senior pitcher Mike Ojala got batted around by Texas, but his presence should help stabilize a young corps. Our bats are finally heating up, as the 26-11 win over Cal two weeks ago can attest. And with Graham at the helm, there should be little doubt that a postseason is just beyond the crest of this semester.

And that's reassuring, because after Rice's most browbeaten year in recent memory, the baseball team's success is not just an expectation - it's a necessity. We need them to pull us out of the gutter. We need them to whip the University of Houstons and University of Texases of the world. We need them to show us that even a year like this can be salvaged.

Any summer spent this side of an Omaha finale is a disappointment, and this season is no different. But expectations aren't the only thing piled on our team's shoulders this year: Now they have to carry an entire university's hopes as well.

No pressure, guys.

Casey Michel is a Brown College senior and former Thresher editor in chief.

---