One small trip for the MSU baseball team, one giant leap for Spartankind.
MSU and Western Michigan's game at 5:30 p.m. today will be the Spartans' first trip to Fifth Third Ballpark in program history. The park, home to the Detroit Tigers' Class-A affiliate West Michigan Whitecaps, is located in Comstock Park, which is less than 10 miles north of Grand Rapids.
"It's a special thing to take our team to other areas," head coach David Grewe said. "We're trying to gain interest all over the state."
Grewe said his inspiration for scheduling the game came from looking within the MSU athletics department, which has developed a reputation for holding games in creative places. The MSU hockey team hosted Michigan at Spartan Stadium in 2001, drawing more than 74,000 fans. The men's basketball team has played in recent years at the Palace of Auburn Hills, Detroit's Ford Field and, this past season, at Grand Rapids' Van Andel Arena.
"I wanted to do it in the worst way, and it just worked out," Grewe said. "I think it's going to be special, kind of like hockey did and basketball did."
This will be the Spartans' sixth game at a minor league park this season. They've already played five times at Oldsmobile Park — home of the Lansing Lugnuts — and will play there seven more times before the season is over.
"Any time you can do that, you kind of get a feel for what the major leaguers feel like," senior pitcher Jeff Gerbe said.
The Spartans (14-13 overall, 4-4 Big Ten) and Broncos split their two meetings last season. MSU won 11-8 on March 4 in Jacksonville, Fla. — its fourth game of the season — but Western avenged that with a 5-2 victory at Oldsmobile Park on May 11.
This season's Broncos (16-12, 4-5 MAC) have won four of their last five games and are coming off a three-game sweep of Akron.
"We have to execute early," senior outfielder Jamey Embree said. "We can't wait a couple innings to get loose. You've got to be ready from the first pitch."
The Spartans, meanwhile, dropped three of four games to Purdue on last weekend's road trip. But if not for a pinch-hit Purdue RBI single in the bottom of the ninth of Sunday's game, the Spartans could easily have earned a split with the Boilermakers, leaving them uniformly optimistic about their chances in the Big Ten.
"We proved this weekend that we can play with anybody in the league," Grewe said. "This is Purdue's best team that they've ever had, and we were inches away from splitting a series with them on the road.
"It was a huge point in our program where we just said, 'This is it. There's no more wondering whether or not we're good enough this year to compete with those teams. We are.'"
