What to look forward to from Mercer baseball

Mercer’s baseball team has regularly been one of the most consistently productive teams on Mercer campus, a fact which has helped the program grow in recent years.

In the last eight seasons, last year’s was the only time they had a losing record in the conference even though their overall record was still positive, and they still managed to finish second in the SoCon tournament.

Fans of Mercer baseball, and even those who may not consider themselves such should pay attention this year due to a batch of freshmen that Collegiate Baseball listed as one of the top recruiting classes in the nation.

Most impressive may be the fact that all of these freshmen come out of the state of Georgia.

“I think first and foremost you have to recruit your home state,” Head Coach Craig Gibson said. “Something different we did a little different this year than we’ve ever done in years past is we were able to bring them all to summer school.”

The reason for this was to help the athletes acclimate to the campus and academic conditions at Mercer, although Gibson said all the athletes easily either met or exceeded the academic criteria for his program.

A good number of the freshman class is composed of pitchers, a necessary priority for the coaches as they were scouting due to the number they lost in last year’s senior class and some juniors who were taken in last year’s draft.

“Moving forward that may not be quite the emphasis for our 2019 class, but our 2018 class was highly represented by the pitching,” Gibson said.

Gibson hinted at a number of pitchers who have shown promise of entering the starting rotation including Peyton Berry, Jackson Kelley and Jeff Jenkins. The pitchers were not the only ones receiving praises, however.

“Positionally, it’s one of the most talented freshman groups we’ve had,” Gibson said. “We could have three or four freshmen starting positionally for us.”

The only other SoCon team to have made Collegiate Baseball’s report was ETSU, who Gibson had only good things to say about concerning their coach and their freshman class.