The Southern Conference baseball tournament has been in Charleston, S.C., since 1990 and before that it was in Asheville, N.C., so when the league moves its competition to the Greenville Drive's beautiful home digs later this month that will be a historic occasion. Well, as historic as anything can be with SoCon baseball, but you get the point.
You'd think this would be great news for my alma mater and co-host, Furman, and it would be if it wasn't for the nagging little problem of the Paladins actually getting to play in said tournament. With two conference weekends left, FU is sitting precariously in eighth out of 12 teams - known otherwise as the last spot that qualifies for the field.
Furman closes with Citadel (no, I won't call Citadel "The" Citadel because, 1, I hate the school, and, 2, it's stupid. So I'm probably doing Pretend Soldier U a favor, but anyway ...), which is tied for fourth in the standings, and UNC-Greensboro, which, at 4-18 in the league, sits comfortably in last.
Davidson is two games ahead of Furman while Samford and Wofford are two back, so you have to figure the 'Dins will make it barring a major collapse. That's good. I guess. What won't be so good, should it happen, would be giving one of the school's all-time worst pitching staffs a chance to add to its ugly numbers. And keep in mind that using the terms "all-time worst" and "Furman baseball" in the same sentence is not a sentence to be taken lightly.
Records are available back to 1963, and only twice has the school had a a worse team ERA than 2009's 7.28: 7.32 in 1985 and 7.51 in 1988. That is not an easy record to break, but it's entirely possible.
Amazingly, two teams in the SoCon have even worse pitching than FU this season: Samford (7.29 ERA) and Wofford (7.91). Sadly, all the potential fireworks won't light up downtown Greenville since, obviously, no more than one and perhaps none of these stellear "pitching" staffs will make the field.
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