MUNCIE, IND. — As the autumn months are underway, so is the Ball State’s baseball team, which uses this time during fall ball to prepare for the spring season.
Ball State baseball has a completely reloaded roster after last year's third-place MAC finish. With many new faces adjusting to the Cardinal culture, head coach, Rich Maloney, made it known how paramount it is to use this time to integrate everyone on the team and to improve.
“The fall is a very important time in anybody’s program, Maloney said. “I mean, we have 20 new players that we’ve got to integrate into our culture, and so it’s a time of team building, a time of development, a time of evaluation and a time of getting better”.
If there is anyone who knows how to get his point across, it would be coach Maloney. Maloney came off of his worst MAC tournament finish this past season, which was third place.
“Well, our expectation is always to win. That's why you put in the time you do…the last four years, we’ve either won the tournament or been a runner-up”, coach Maloney stated.
This message has been permeating through the clubhouse, as many of his players, including junior shortstop Dylan Grego, have adopted this rhetoric about taking advantage of this time to improve.
“We’ve played a couple of teams so far,” Grego said. “We got one more next week, the 12th against Butler, and so it just treats these games as a new opportunity to mesh as a team and get better and, like we say, try to get 1% better every day.”
With this mentality, the Cardinals should find themselves atop the MAC rankings yet again.
Contact Zander Woods with comments at zander.woods@bsu.edu.
