Monday, August 14, 2006
Riding high after its first Big 12 Tournament championship, the baseball team finished the season with a 43-25 record. The 43 victories were the second most in program history and meant a fourth consecutive season with 40 victories. Coincidentally, it was coach Ritch Price’s fourth season with the team.
“The first thing for me, it was a fulfillment of a dream,” Price said. “And the second thing was our goal to get 40 wins and we’ve done it for a school record four times in a row. Then we wanted to finish top 20 in the country, we finished at 22 and made the NCAA tournament. It was a great personal feeling of accomplishment.”
Nearing the end of a season deemed difficult enough to earn a No. 26 RPI ranking based on strength of schedule, the Jayhawks dropped a pair of key games to the University of Northern Colorado in May.
Those losses almost killed the opportunity for a bid to the NCAA tournament, Almost.
In late May, the Jayhawks swept Texas A&M; at home and took a No. 6 seed with them to the Big 12 Tournament in Oklahoma City.
Kansas outscored its opponents 31-18 in four straight victories, including the 9-7 victory against No. 14 Nebraska in the championship.
“It’s still fresh,” junior third baseman Erik Morrison said of the tournament his team won more than two months ago. “We were just a real close knit group of guys who worked hard and took it seriously.”
Morrison said winning the tournament made him sigh with relief.
“We were head and shoulders better than what everybody thought we were going to be,” Morrison said.
But they weren’t done, yet. The Jayhawks were automatically granted a bid to the NCAA tournament and were sent to the Corvallis, Ore., regional, hosted by Oregon State, for its first appearance since 1994.
Kansas overcame an early 5-0 deficit in its tournament opener against Hawaii to win 9-6. Defeating Hawaii stretched Kansas’ winning streak to eight games, but it would go no further. Oregon State, the eventual National Champion, crushed Kansas 11-3 before Hawaii ended the Jayhawks postseason run altogether with a 9-5 victory.
“It was kind of a bittersweet ending. We’d just won the Big 12 tournament and everybody was still high off that,” Morrison said. “It sucked to lose to Hawaii, but that’s how baseball is. One game can end it.”
Kansas finished its conference season tied for fifth place, the highest since the Big 12’s creation in 1996.
The Jayhawks’ conference tournament title was their first since winning the Big Seven in 1949. The six Jayhawks drafted into the Major League tied for the most drafted from Kansas, and its 75 home runs set a team record.
“We’d go out somewhere and people didn’t even know KU had a baseball team,” Morrison said of their trip to Oregon.
Morrison was amused. “Kansas does have a baseball team,” he said. “And we can play a little bit.”
Kansan senior sportswriter Alissa Bauer can be contacted at abauer@kansan.com.
— Edited by Mindy Ricketts
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