Throughout the entire season, MSU baseball head coach Jake Boss Jr. has put an emphasis on his team’s games against in-state opponents, saying he wants to win every series.
This week, the Spartans (32-17 overall, 10-11 Big Ten) have a chance to finish the season having taken at least three of four in-state series when they take on Central Michigan (30-19, 17-7 Mid-American Conference) at 3:05 p.m. Tuesday at Theunissen Stadium in Mt. Pleasant, Mich.
Although MSU is in the midst of a muddled Big Ten Conference race, Boss said his aspirations for being state champions have not changed, and he reminded his team of that immediately following Sunday’s loss to Indiana.
“As we told (the players) in the outfield just now, one of the goals at the beginning of the year was to win every series in the state,” Boss said. “We split with Western Michigan, we beat Michigan and we’d like to take two out of three from Central Michigan, so that’s still an important series.”
The Spartans also won all three games against Eastern Michigan.
MSU beat the Chippewas, 13-10, March 31 in their first meeting this season at Cooley Law School Stadium in Lansing. But three weeks later Central Michigan won the second game of the series, 6-3, at Dow Diamond in Midland.
After falling to the Chippewas in April, junior first baseman Jeff Holm said the Spartans have a bit of payback lined up for the team currently in second place in the MAC’s West Division.
“We owe them from last time we played them,” Holm said. “We all just have to go in there and play how we know we can.”
Both Holm and senior outfielder Eli Boike said the Big Ten race will be in the back of their minds all week, but as they have done all season, the Spartans plan on using a midweek game against a formidable opponent to stay sharp for their conference matchups during the weekend. Tuesday’s game is the final nonconference matchup of the regular season for the Spartans, who begin a three-game series with Northwestern on Thursday in Evanston, Ill.
“You think about the Big Ten, but you still have to focus on those other games,” Boike said. “You don’t want to get lackadaisical during those midweek games because then you start developing bad habits, and you’ll probably bring those into the weekend.”
As MSU found out earlier in the season when it lost to Central Michigan and Western Michigan in consecutive weeks, beating MAC opponents is not an easy task. The Chippewas come into Tuesday as one of the best fielding teams in the MAC, boast a conference-leading 4.37 team ERA and have one of the best hitters in the league in outfielder and first baseman Nate Theunissen. Central Michigan also has 30 wins, which is third in the MAC.
“We know they’re a good team, obviously, since they’ve beat us before,” Boss said. “We need to play well in order to be able to go out there and
beat them.”
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