With the 2002 baseball season approaching and fall practice coming to an end, the Bulldogs have good reason to look forward to another successful year. Last year, the 2001 squad won the SEC tournament in Hoover, Ala., and finished the season ranked No. 14 in the nation.
Mississippi State will be returning most of those players this season.
Only six players graduated and will not return in 2002.
Head coach Ron Polk does not seem too worried about the slight loss.
“I think we’ve got plenty of people to fill the spots,” Polk said. “We lost a couple key guys off last year’s team as we do every year. Any team does. We’ve got enough depth right now. We’ve just got to stay healthy.”
As head baseball coach, Polk is also filling a spot this year-one that he held for 22 years until 1998 when he began a brief stint at Georgia.
Upon his return to Mississippi State, Polk has become confident in the team, particularly in the pitching staff.
“We’ve got some experience in a lot of places, especially on the mound,” Polk said. “Our pitching situation should be good enough to keep us in ballgames.”
The Bulldogs hold ample skill at the pitching position with aces like Tanner Brock.
Brock went 7-2 last season as a junior and was named All-Conference in the SEC.
Brock also has a positive outlook on the pitching situation for the 2002 team.
“We’ve got a lot of younger guys that are going to step up this year, and we’ve got a lot of older guys coming back,” Brock said. “We didn’t really lose much pitching at all last year.”
MSU will have a strong defense away from the mound as well, including junior Matthew Maniscalco, who will be playing shortstop again in the spring.
Maniscalco is already an accomplished infielder. As a freshman, he started all 61 games and led the SEC in fielding percentage among shortstops, assuring him a place on the Freshman All-American team.
“We’ve got our whole infield coming back. … That’s just more experience,” Maniscalco said. “Last year, we were real inexperienced, but we still had a great year defensively … I think we’re going to be stronger than we were last year.”
Polk views the team’s overall defense as its primary strength, but he realizes that they will need to provide some run support in order to win.
“We just need to do a little better job of our approach to hitting by using the whole field,” Polk said. “We need to put more pressure on the (opposing) defense by the way we generate our offense.”
Since the Bulldogs won the SEC Tournament Title as a moderate underdog in 2001, other SEC teams might be especially anxious to play them in the upcoming season.
“Everybody in the SEC is very competitive,” Polk said. “It’s just a typical SEC season coming up. Right now, there’s no one team that jumps out at you and says ‘I’m the best.'”
Polk, who won the SEC Championship last season at Georgia, said he hopes to successfully defend his title at Mississippi State in 2002.
If he gets his wish, the Bulldogs will bring home their first regular season SEC Championship since 1989.