Matchups set in Athens, Atlanta

          Some years, college baseball in Georgia is so-so. And then there’s 2019.
          Georgia Tech earned a No. 3 national seed and Georgia a No. 4 for the NCAA baseball tournament.
          Georgia, a No. 8 national seed last year, will play Mercer at 7 p.m. on Friday, with Florida State and Florida Atlantic playing earlier.
          Florida State will draw plenty of attention in Athens, since legendary head coach Mike Martin is retiring, making the Seminoles a sentimental national favorite.
          Georgia Tech hosts Florida A&M, Coastal Carolina – which eliminated Georgia Southern on Sunday – and Auburn.
          The Yellow Jackets were last a national seed in 2006, a No. 8. Tech was a No. 2 national seed in 2005.

By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com

          Sunday went as well as it could have for Mercer’s baseball team.

          Monday pretty much matched it.

          The Bears and their closest fans gathered at Wild Wing Café to watch the NCAA Tournament selection show, and dreams came true 14 minutes into the broadcast.

          Georgia.

          The Bears will face the nationally seeded Bulldogs on Friday at 7 p.m. in the Athens Regional, Mercer getting a No. 4 seed for the regional, as expected.

          Georgia is a national No. 4 seed.

          Friday night’s game pits – figuratively – a pair of former high school teammates against each other. Georgia ace Tony Locey and Mercer’s Tanner Hall were starting pitchers – Hall also played first and batted cleanup - on Houston County’s 2016 Class 5A state championship team. The third member of that rotation? D.L. Hall, currently a rising star in the Baltimore Orioles farm system.

A huge Sunday for Mercer at SoCon tournament

          The teams’ last meeting in Athens came in 2017, the Bears taking a 4-3 win in 12 innings. Nick Spear, who was huge in the Southern Conference Tournament, got the win in that game.

          Current Bears who were on that team: Spear, Alex Alvord, Jordan Ammons, Kyle Bialousz, Ben Brock, Kevin Coulter, Alex Crotty, Sawyer Gipson-Long, Zach Graveno, Andrew Kane, Taylor Lobus, and David Posas.

          Crotty played in 38 games in 2017 and Posas 22. Coulter, Spear, Graveno, and Kane saw at least a fair amount of pitching action.

          This is Mercer’s sixth conference tournament title, starting in 1979 and dating back to its Trans America Athletic Conference days. The Bears won their first Southern Conference title in 2015, five years after the breakthrough Atlantic Sun Conference championship.

          The Bears had been in a tournament title drought dating back to 1983.

          It was in 2010 that Mercer started a streak of winning at least 35 games. A tournament title, through the loser’s bracket and getting the break of playing an unbeaten team in the final round, was needed this year to keep it alive.

          A year later, the Bears gathered at Wild Wing believing they were going to get an at-large bid, but they were among the first teams left out.

          Mercer got its first at-large bid in program history two years later, and six years ago to the day Monday, thanks to a record-setting 42-16 regular season. The Bears went only 1-2 in the A-Sun tournament, but got a bid and went to Starkville, Miss.

          In 2014, Mercer held a mini watch party in a meeting room at the University Center, because the Bears were a quality candidate for an at-large bid with an RPI of 46. But they were left out.

          The Bears’ RPI has risen about 30 spots in the past week, and they enter the postseason at No. 107, to No. 3 for Georgia Florida Atlantic is 37th and Florida State is 50th.