2024 Mid-American Conference Baseball Week 8 Recap

Weather dominated the midweek games with many of the scheduled dates unfortunately being cancelled. There’s always at least one week like this in the calendar, let's hope this is the one.

Bowling Green comes back to MAC play and it’s a new weekend but the result is the same. From the outside looking in, a reasonable goal for the Falcons was to make the MAC Tournament with the expanded field. That’s not mathematically locked up, but it’s hard to imagine that a 12-0 start can finish seventh in the regular season.

I think now the question is how far can the Falcons ride their surge? Can they win the MAC Tournament and make noise in an NCAA Regional? It’s too early to worry about that, but the sights have shifted.

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Week 8 Conference Standings

Bowling Green is almost halfway through their MAC schedule and they haven’t lost yet. They’ve dominated the league. They lead in runs for and runs against which leads to a run differential of +93 in MAC games. That’s almost eight runs a game and a five-and-a-half-game lead over the sixth-best team. They could fall apart pretty badly and wouldn’t be in trouble to make the MAC Tournament.

Toledo took two out of three from Central Michigan and it wasn’t easy. The CMU baseball team is pesky even if their record doesn’t reflect that. Two games were decided by a single run and the Rockets had to work to maintain the lead in game three. As the season goes on, Central Michigan might not be a tournament team, but they will affect the seeding when they steal a series from someone they shouldn’t.

The Rockets avoided that fate and racked up the wins while they could. Their schedule is the most difficult down the stretch, but they’re positioned well to weather the storm.

Western Michigan added distance between itself and the cut line with a sweep of Ohio but is still only up by a game and a half. Despite it being tight, they are the third seed currently and everything is still in play. Beating Bowling Green feels impossible now, but someone will at some point. Ohio continues to trend down and is now on a seven-game losing streak in the conference. This year is not an Ohio year.

Miami avoids being swept by Ball State, but the Cardinals are lurking on the outside looking in. They are now one game down from the final spot with the easiest remaining schedule. They are not a team that anyone would like to see sneak into the tournament field.

Northern Illinois continues to fade, but the most difficult series of the year is in their rear-view mirror. At only two games out, the Huskies feel like the last team with a realistic shot of getting in the dance. Central Michigan, Ohio and Akron are all further out and need a major turn of fortune to make a run at the tournament. If NIU continues its descent, one team will be left out in the cold after a season just short of the sixth seed.

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Stat leaders at the halfway point

We’re halfway through the college baseball season so it’s time to look at the players that lead the MAC.

The offensive stat I like to use is weighted on-base average, or wOBA, since it assigns a weight to each outcome of an at bat that reaches base. On base plus slugging, OPS, does that too but not as precisely. The OPS of a home run is 5.000 and the OPS of a single is 2.000. A home run is more valuable than a single but not quite two and a half times more valuable.

The top five wOBAs in the MAC belong to three teams. Ohio’s Gideon Antle leads the MAC with a pair of Broncos, CJ Richmond and Cade Sullivan, not far behind and Jack Krause and Tyler Ross from Bowling Green tied at 4th.

Gideon Antle has done it all this year. He leads in hits, doubles, batting average, slugging percentage and OPS. He’s 4th in RBI and is 6th in on-base percentage. Those are MAC Player of the Year numbers and he definitely sticks out in the Bobcat lineup.

CJ Richmond is a transfer from Iowa Western, a JUCO program, and has been an incredible hitter this year. He’s adapted to MAC baseball like a duck to water and has been a great compliment to Cade Sullivan. It’s hard to put Sullivan on first with Richmond right behind him in the lineup.

If we want to talk about lineup protection, Bowling Green has an incredibly deep lineup to pitch to. If we expand the wOBA leaderboard to the top ten, four spots belong to the Falcons. DJ Newman is the 8th best hitter and Nathan Archer is tenth and they make up the top of the lineup card regularly. In the week six recap, I wrote about the Bowling Green roster a little bit and the hitters have kept hitting.

On the bump, Ball State’s Merritt Beeker and Central Michigan’s Adam Mrakitsch lead the MAC with 63 strikeouts a piece. Beeker leads the MAC in strikeouts per nine innings which is usually led by a reliever. He has a tendency to get hit occasionally which has kept his innings down, but there’s no doubt about his stuff.

Central Michigan’s hope to win a series rests on Mrakitsch going deep into games and being effective in game one and Keegan Batka doing the same in game two. Batka is third in strikeouts but it’s 48 to the leader's 63.

You are not going to see MLB earned run averages in the MAC. There are a bunch of reasons for that but a big one is how the sport prioritizes pitching. Major League teams want team control for their pitchers to manage their load. That’s not to say college pitchers are the leftovers, but the hitters and their metal bats are typically more developed.

Nolan Vlcek leads the MAC with a 2.40 ERA for Western Michigan. He’s been great this season and the one start where he gave up a bunch of runs, they were unearned. DJ Newman is fourth in ERA and is the regular designated hitter when he’s not starting on the mound. His 3.38 ERA is great for the MAC and the Bowling Green offense. They don’t have any issues scoring four runs. Even more impressive is his 1.15 walks and hits per inning pitched, good for third among qualified pitchers.

Brennan McCune leads the MAC in WHIP out of the Toledo bullpen. He allows 1.01 walks plus hits per inning, and this week was much better than that in his six innings of work. Calvin Bickerstaff is second in six appearances, all starts, for Kent State.

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Quick Notes:

• Ball State at Miami: Ball State’s offense only scored six runs but won two games. The pitching on both sides was great and Miami avoided the sweep with an offensive explosion in game three. Ball State scored two crucial runs in the top of the sixth inning in game one to win and were slightly more aggressive on the basepaths and found the timely hits to win game two. Miami knocked Will Jacobson out of the game in the first inning in the finale.
• Bowling Green at Northern Illinois: Bowling Green waited until the ninth inning of the first game to break the tie, but Jack Krause’s three-run bomb was enough for the win. Nate Archer didn’t wait in game two and homered in his first two plate appearances to drive in four runs. Landon Willeman cruised for the Falcons in game three while the offense turned outs into runs until they got the big hit in the five-run fifth inning. The MAC does not have an answer for the Falcons right now.
• Toledo at Central Michigan: Central Michigan continues to be on the wrong end of tight weekend sets. Toledo got to Adam Mrakitsch, the first team to do that in a while, and then the squads traded one-run games. The Chippewas jumped out to a six-run lead but needed runs in the 8th and 9th to walk it off. All the runs in the final game were scored in a nine-out stretch. Toledo scored on a squeeze bunt in the top of the fifth, Danny Wuestenfeld hit a two-run home run in the bottom of the fifth and Justin Konczak responded with a two-run shot of his own to provide the final score. Central Michigan played well and still lost two games.
• Eastern Michigan at Kent State: Kent State scored 41 total runs in the series and jumped on the Eastern Michigan starters early. The Eagles scored 13 in the middle game and avoided the sweep, but Kent State was relentless. Their on-base plus slugging for the series was over 1.000 and they stole 11 bases. The series of the weekend was heavily tilted in the Flashes' favor and Kent State is finding their form at the perfect time.
• Western Michigan at Ohio: Western Michigan let the Bobcats score runs for seven innings in the first game, then decided to put an end to that nonsense. Gideon Antle drove in a run in the bottom of the seventh to take a 5-4 lead and didn’t threaten the rest of the game, which went to 12 innings and a walk plated the winning run for the Broncos. Western Michigan did allow a run on an error in the fifth inning of game two, but the game was 7-0 at that point. Game three was a four-hit shutout win for Western Michigan and they emphatically took the series in Athens. The bullpen did not allow a run over the series.
• Akron: The Zips had a tough weekend at a middle to top-end Souther Conference team in Western Carolina. Two home runs for the Catamounts scored three runs in a 7-3 game that was close without those two at-bats. Akron suffered a barrage of runners on the bases in game two but pulled out a 15-8 win in the final game after jumping to an 11-2 lead.

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Notable Performances

Nolan Vlcek pitched a complete game in game two for the Broncos in their series with Ohio, allowing one run and striking out six batters. Vlcek started the year as the Bronco's long reliever and has forced himself into the rotation. His last five appearances have been starts with wins in two of his last three. I don’t know if I can trust this, mistakes happen in college baseball stat reporting, but the box score says he went the distance in 69 pitches. That is either a mistake or a legendary start for Vlcek.

Eric Chalus and Keegan Johnson held their opponents in check and earned wins. Chalus gave up a lone run in the top of the fifth inning and allowed four base runners outside of that inning in the rest of the 5.2 innings he pitched. Johnson didn’t get much run support but he didn’t much either. He pitched six scoreless innings for Ball State in game two and struck out ten batters in the 18 he recorded.

Toledo’s Brennan McCune appeared in four games this week! He pitched in consecutive days in midweek action and in game one and game three. He handled high-leverage innings in every appearance, some more than others. The highest leverage was during the third game of the CMU series when he entered the fifth inning with two outs trailing by one run. He pitched 2.1 innings and retired every batter he faced. That gave Toledo the time it needed to take the lead and they did.

Carson Byers kept Miami in the game with three innings of scoreless work and was solid in mop-up duty in game three. Hayden Burg pitched five innings in his lone appearance against Ohio. He entered to start the 8th inning and finished Ohio off in the 12th. He retired the first seven batters he faced, gave up a single and retired the next eight in an excellent relief appearance.

Josh Johnson and Kyle Jackson drove the Kent State offense in their series against Eastern Michigan. They drove in a combined 17 runs and going 12-26 at the plate. Ohio tried to take the bat out of Cade Sullivan’s hands but he still went 6-11 with a home run around the five walks they gave him. Danny Wuestenfeld tried to do it all for the Chippewas and 8-18 with six RBI is a great week for the first baseman.

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A look ahead to Week 9:

Kent State could be playing in an interesting series every weekend for the rest of the season and this one is no different. They head to Toledo trying to pass them in the standings, which would happen with a series win. They just did the same thing to Eastern Michigan and their specific brand of Kent State baseball gives every team problems when they’re on. The offenses are very even on paper, but Kent State’s run prevention is better by a run per game. One run in college baseball is virtually nothing.

Bowling Green hosts Central Michigan and will attempt to get to 15-0 with another sweep. The CMU team has a certified ace going in game one and Danny Wuestenfeld can pop one over the wall if the pitch isn’t located well. Bowling Green has had the weapons on both sides to overcome a mistake here or there, but baseball is a weird game.

Miami heads to Kalamazoo to play Western Michigan and attempt to stay in the top six. The Broncos are rolling right now and won’t make that easy at home. The implications of this series could be huge for either team. A WMU win solidifies them as probably the second or third-best team right now in the MAC, but a series loss could get them jumped by a few teams. Miami is in a similar position. A loss could find them in seventh, but two out of three wins would keep them in position for another week.

Ball State hosts a slumping Akron team and needs to flex its way to wins. Due to the Cardinal’s slow start, they can’t mess around with Akron. Two out of three wins every weekend would put the Cardinals at 17-13 which would make the tournament, but it gets less sure with every missing loss.

Northern Illinois is the odd team out and they stay in state to play Big Ten Illinois. Illinois isn’t great this year, but they are a Big Ten program. Avoiding a sweep would be a good weekend for the Huskies.

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Series Scores: