Baseball travels to Fort Myers, Fla. to begin season
The alarms were set for 3 a.m. Thursday morning for the Central Michigan baseball team, which practiced Thursday in preparation for four weekend games against Florida Gulf Coast according to Head Coach Steve Jaksa.
Jaksa said the two teams match up well, with CMU finishing 2014 with a 35-23 record and FGCU finishing at 39-22. Game one will be Friday at 6:30 p.m., the teams will play a doubleheader on Saturday and finish Sunday with an 11:30 a.m. game.
“You get to know them very well,” Jaksa said. “We’ll have a good idea of what some of their strategies are offensively. We’ll watch the video after each of those games, we’ll make our adjustments.”
CMU is 3-3 in the all-time series against FGSU, which began in 2009.
While CMU started 2014 with an 0-4 record, Jaksa said the focus for this weekend isn’t solely working out the bugs.
“Just because it’s snowing up here, (people) are used to a preseason or spring training,” Jaksa said. “That’s not what this is. This counts on our record, it’s important that we understand that we’re looking to solidify this unit over a period of games.”
While all eight position players that started 40 or more games last season return for 2015, the Chippewas will be without pitchers Jordan Foley and Pat Kaminska.
Foley was drafted in the fifth round of the Major League Baseball draft by the New York Yankees in June and plays for the Staten Island Yankees. Kaminska went undrafted, but was signed by Texas Rangers affiliate Hickory Crawdads.
Still, Jaksa expects the pitching to be strong this weekend.
“We fully expect that we’re going to play well enough in game one and pitch well enough that we’ll be able to win game one,” Jaksa said. “We’re not going down there experimenting. We’re going to have our guys ready to go.”
