On first practice of season, Wichita State baseball players rave about team’s hitting

There was no shortage of confidence among the leaders on the Wichita State baseball team ahead of the season’s first practice on Sunday afternoon at Eck Stadium.

For a club that underwent a head coaching change just five weeks ago and is once again projected as a bottom-half team by American Athletic Conference coaches, the Shockers believe their offense will turn heads this season.

“I’d be very surprised if we’re not one or two in the conference offensive-wise,” WSU junior Brock Rodden said.

“We’re going to be able to hit the ball pretty hard,” added WSU sophomore Payton Tolle with a sly grin. “It’s going to be fun running around the bases. We’re going to be able to hit. Our offense, we’re going to score some runs.”

There’s a strong case to back up their optimism: the Shockers return their six top bats from last season’s lineup, highlighted by Rodden, the preseason AAC Player of the Year who is back at WSU after turning down 10th-round money in the MLB Draft this past summer.

When WSU made a late-season push, which included an 18-0 win over an Oklahoma team that would later play for the College World Series championship, Rodden (.338 average, 17 home runs, 48 RBI), Chuck Ingram (.310 average, 14 home runs, 53 RBI), Tolle (.317 average), Jordan Rogers (.307 average), Sawyre Thornhill (.278 average, eight home runs, 36 RBI) and Seth Stroh (.257 average) were all in WSU’s lineup.

A trio of juniors, all newcomers, seem poised to join in on the hit parade this season in Garrett Pennington, who hit .397 with 37 extra-base hits to earn third team All-American honors for a top-10 Div. II team at Central Missouri last season, David Herring, who batted .348 as the starting shortstop for a Cowley County team that played for the NJCAA national championship, and outfielder Kyte McDonald, a former Mississippi State recruit.

“We’re returning (a lot) of our best hitters and you saw against OU what we did with those guys that we have back this year,” Thornhill said. “And then you have the new additions and I think we have a good shot at being really good.

“We’re ready to take that first series in Long Beach and come back to Wichita and absolutely destroy.”

New head coach Loren Hibbs wasn’t ready to throw out any flashy descriptors of his team’s offense before the first practice of the season, but he did acknowledge “it’s exciting” to have so much offensive talent back.

While Hibbs might be considered a first-year head coach after moving into the role on an interim basis after Eric Wedge’s separation from the program in December, he has nearly three decades of experience as a college baseball head coach. Before serving as WSU’s director of operations the last three seasons, Hibbs, a former WSU star player, was the head coach at Charlotte for 27 years.

“It’s like getting on a bike again, to be honest with you,” Hibbs said. “I’ve done this for a lot of years and I just want our players to be put in a position where they’ve got a chance to be successful.

“(The transition) has been challenging, but we’re going to do what’s best for Wichita State baseball, do what’s best for our players and keep moving this program forward.”

For Sunday, Hibbs was ecstatic about the unseasonably tolerable weather in Wichita for mid-January that allowed WSU to practice outside at Eck Stadium.

He was also pleased that his players were on time and ready to go for Sunday’s 6 a.m. conditioning test.

“I’m old-school Wichita State,” Hibbs said. “We’re going to play with toughness, we’re going to play with energy and we’re going to compete.”

With four preseason all-conference players, including the Player of the Year, WSU believes it has the talent to be the team to end the program’s postseason drought, which dates back to 2013.

After a disappointing 21-36 campaign last season, the Shockers want to be the surprise team in the conference this season.

“What happened last year, we don’t want to happen again,” Tolle said. “We want to win. We’re going to come in and we’re going to work hard. We’re blue-collar workers here and we’re going to want to win.”

The lineup seems destined to produce plenty of runs this season. The question of WSU’s pitching talent and depth looms once again as the season approaches with WSU’s season-opening series at Long Beach State slated to start Feb. 17.

Cameron Bye, a preseason all-conference selection, and Tolle return from WSU’s weekend rotation, while WSU added a pair of instant-impact arms from the junior-college ranks in Grant Adler and Clark Candiotti. WSU also welcomes a talented freshmen class that features promising pitchers such as Austin Henry, Nate Snead, Michael Mulhollon and Parker Dilhoff.

“We don’t have top-end stuff, which is fine, but we have guys with good-enough stuff that if we do a good-enough job coaching them, we have a chance to be successful,” Hibbs said. “It goes hand-in-hand with playing defense. We’ve got to defend to help our pitchers. We’ve got to do a good job behind the plate receiving the ball. And the main thing is we’ve got to throw it across the plate. If we do that, we’re going to give ourselves a chance and we have a chance to be a pretty good pitching staff.”