The MSU baseball team will get a stiff early season test this weekend when it travels to Tallahassee, Fla. for a three-game series against traditional baseball power Florida State.
The series against Florida State will be three of seven games the Spartans will play in Florida during spring break.
Head coach Ted Mahan said he expects the Spartans to compete with the Seminoles this weekend and playing a tradition-rich team such as Florida State will help MSU in the long run.
“When we get into the (Big Ten) conference (season), we would have already faced the best pitchers, we would have already faced the best hitters because we’ve already faced Florida State,” he said. “I think it’s going to help us down the road and that’s why I scheduled it.”
Junior tri-captain and third baseman Troy Bergman said the team is excited about the challenge of facing the Seminoles.
“They’re known as a national powerhouse in baseball so it’ll be a good test for us,” he said. “But they put their pants on the same way we do. We’ll go down there and play baseball.”
The Spartans may be catching the Seminoles at the right time because they are off to an uncharacteristically slow start and don’t find themselves anywhere near the top of the polls.
Florida State is 4-5 on the year and is ranked 19th in the Baseball America top 25 poll and 21st in the USA Today/ESPN top 25 poll.
Bergman said despite their record and standing in the polls, the Spartans will know better than to take the Seminoles lightly.
“We’re not going to let it fool us -we know they are a good baseball team,” he said. “To beat them, we’re going to have to play good baseball for three games.”
MSU will try to rebound from last weekend when it dropped a pair of 5-4 decisions to Troy State in Alabama.
Bergman said there were some positives in the Spartans’ performance despite those two losses.
“It was difficult not picking up a win, but there were a lot of good things that came out of the weekend,” he said. “We worked hard, everybody stuck together and we had a chance to win both games. In the future we’ll win those games.”
Spartan players and coaches have pointed out that they are at a disadvantage for the first couple of weeks of the season because the southern teams they’re up against have been playing and practicing outdoors for weeks.
Meanwhile, MSU has been forced to practice indoors at the Duffy Daugherty Football Building and IM Sports-West because of the cold weather.
Junior infielder/DH/pitcher Kyle Geswein said given that disadvantage, he thought the Spartans performed admirably against Troy State.
“I think we looked real well as far as our first couple of outings compared to theirs,” he said. “They’ve been out for 12 games.”
Geswein, who went 4-for-8 with 3 RBI and a 1 home run in the two losses last weekend, said he hopes the Spartans won’t be at too big of a disadvantage against the Seminoles this weekend.
“We can’t let them get to us - we kind of got to stick within our plan we have,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll get a couple of breaks our way and then maybe win a couple down there.”
