Ag baseball to open season
Utah State’s boys of summer are back.
The Aggie baseball team opens its season this weekend with three games on three separate days at the Salt Lake Community College tournament.
USU will face Colorado Northwestern Community College Thursday at 10:30 a.m. and Friday at 4:30 p.m., as well as SLCC Saturday at 4:30 p.m.
All games will take place on Cate Field, which has a playing surface made of a vertically draining all-rubber synthetic material called Sprinturf that, according to the SLCC athletics Web site, cost $1.9 million to install last August.
USU Head Coach Ernie Rivers said playing on the artificial surface will be somewhat of an adjustment for a few players who haven’t competed there before, but for everybody else it shouldn’t be a hindrance.
“For the new guys it will probably take a little bit of getting used to,” Rivers said. “But we played at least four games there [in the fall], so its worn off.”
Another minor adjustment the Aggies will be making is the use of a wood bat — which each team is required to use for the weekend games. Add in the fact CNCC and SLCC are scholarship teams (both are members of the Scenic West Athletic Conference) who are traditionally tough to compete with for USU, and it should make for an interesting weekend.
A wood bat tends to jam a player on his hands, Rivers said, which makes getting a solid connection with the ball slightly more cumbersome.
“With a metal bat you can hit a home run off it,” he said. “A lot of it is a mental adjustment.
“We’ll go into this weekend playing some scholarship schools and expecting to be competitive. It’s hard to compete with [them], but we’ll see.”
–samhis@cc.usu.edu