Why Coastal Carolina may be the final team to host the Sun Belt baseball championship

It’s a good thing Coastal Carolina managed to attract the Sun Belt Conference Championship next year, which will be CCU’s third season in the league.

CCU may be the last conference team to have the advantage of hosting the tournament that awards an automatic berth into an NCAA regional to the winner.

The baseball tournament has rotated between member school hosts, as it was at Georgia Southern last year and moved to Louisiana-Lafayette this year.

But Montgomery, Ala., will be the host site beginning in 2020. The agreement between the Sun Belt, the Central Alabama Sports Commission and the city of Montgomery has a five-year term to hold the annual championship at Riverwalk Stadium from at least 2020 to 2024.

“Montgomery is a city rich with history and more recently it has seen a revitalization of its downtown area that will make for a perfect home for the Sun Belt Baseball Championship,” said Sun Belt Conference Commissioner Karl Benson.

The conference already has a relationship with the city of Montgomery through a partnership with the Raycom Media Camellia Bowl.

Riverwalk Stadium opened in downtown Montgomery in 2004, has 20 luxury suites, seats 4,500 patrons and can accommodate up to 7,000 fans when general admission tickets are included. It is home to the minor league Montgomery Biscuits and is built into a converted railroad station.

Six suites are built into the old train terminal along the first base line and the remaining 14 run along the third base line.

Potent offense

Coastal Carolina has relied on a potent offense this season to amass its 39-17 record, ranking in the top 15 in the nation in at least seven offensive categories, according to research done by CCU associate athletic director for media relations Mike Cawood.

The Chants entered the Sun Belt tournament sixth in the NCAA in runs scored and runs scored per game with 430 and 7.8 respectively, third in bases on balls (314), sixth in doubles (127), 11th in home runs (69) and on-base percentage (.400) and 15th in slugging percentage (.474).

Coastal also ranks in the top 15 in a pitching category, ranking 14th in fewest hits allowed per nine innings with 7.61. Chants pitchers allowed 10 hits to UT-Arlington in eight innings Wednesday.

Bullpen going bare

Perhaps Coastal Carolina’s biggest concern entering the Sun Belt Conference Championship, and moving forward in the NCAA tournament, is pitching depth, particularly in the bullpen.

The loss either prior to the season or early in the season of upperclass pitchers Bobby Holmes, Austin Kitchen and Scott Kobos – who are all potential Major League Baseball draft picks – to injuries took at least one possible starter and two or three key bullpen pitchers away from the Chants.

Coastal is further hampered this week by an elbow injury to freshman righthander Shaddon Peavyhouse, who has been used as a closer but may not be available all week, according to CCU head coach Gary Gilmore. In addition, freshman righthander Zach McCambley has a blood blister from his outing Saturday and may not be available until the weekend, if at all this week.

“If he busts that thing and is out for the regional we’re in a world of hurt at this point,” Gilmore said. “This time of year it takes an entire staff of guys and they’re going to have to figure it out.”

Gilmore acknowledged the need for his young bullpen arms to develop quickly after he stuck with sophomore Jay Causey for the final 2 2/3 innings in a 5-2 win over North Carolina on May 9.

“A couple of the young guys down there that have really, really good stuff, where they’re at confidence-wise if you put them into a game like that and they end up giving up a big swing and we lose the game, I don’t know that they could recover from it for the rest of the year,” Gilmore said. “So I couldn’t really afford to take that chance.”

Small ball approach

Gilmore is noted for his small-ball approach, which has placed the Chants among the top 10 leaders in sacrifice bunts in the country in five of the previous nine years.

And the approach has been successful, as since 2015, CCU has scored 69.3 percent of the time following a sacrifice bunt.

Coastal tried to scratch a run across Wednesday against Texas-Arlington in the fifth inning in what was then a one-run game. Keaton Weisz singled to lead off the inning and was sacrificed to second by Matt Beaird. But Weisz was stranded after both Cory Wood and Seth Lancaster lined out to left field.

Though the Chants have bunted less this season, the numbers have increased recently. After losing two out of three games to Louisiana-Lafayette earlier this month when the Ragin Cajuns used multiple sacrifice bunts, eight of CCU’s 36 sacrifices have come in the past eight games.

Stache commitment

Coastal senior shortstop Seth Lancaster has his own version of a Stanley Cup beard in the form of a fabulous mustache.

Lancaster has been growing it for a couple months and says the brown mustache with a slight Fu Manchu element will remain above his lip until the Chants are eliminated from the postseason.

“The mustache is staying until we lose," he said. "We were going to do it at the beginning of the season with everybody, but it ended up I was the only one who shaved my face for it, so they kind of left me hanging. But it’s going to stay until we lose”

This story was originally published May 23, 2018 at 7:21 PM with the headline "Why Coastal Carolina may be the final team to host the Sun Belt baseball championship."