Finishing with a Bang

Georgia Southern’s unlikely run to the Southern Conference (SoCon) baseball championship game ended with four Eagles turning pro.

It was as unlikely a matchup as one could have expected in the SoCon Tournament championship game.

On Sunday, May 27, 2012, in Greenville, S.C., No. 6 seed Georgia Southern played No. 4 seed for all the marbles, including an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament, and it took extra innings to decide the winner.

The Eagles had a potential third SoCon championship in four years on the line, and the Samford Bulldogs were looking for their first-ever SoCon title and a shot at their first-ever NCAA tournament win. Samford won the championship game, 9-6, with a bases-clearing triple in the top of the 10th. It was a rematch of the 2011 championship game, which the Eagles won, 1-0.

“I thought there were two teams in Greenville that really looked like they were on a mission, and that was us and Samford,” said Georgia Southern head coach Rodney Hennon, who won at least 30 games as a head coach for the 15th consecutive season, the ninth-longest such streak among active coaches. “I thought both teams played great baseball all week, and obviously something had to give on Sunday.”

The Eagles had to battle through injuries and early struggles during the 2012 campaign, beginning just as the season got underway. The biggest hit came on Feb. 25 against Radford, when right fielder Victor Roache, who led the NCAA with 30 home runs in 2011, broke his wrist diving for a ball in right field.

Despite the season-ending injury, Roache was drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers in the first round of the Major League Baseball Draft on Monday, June 4. He was the 28th overall pick of the Draft.

“He’s a first-round talent, and he’s proved that,” said Hennon about the junior slugger. “I’m glad the Brewers had faith in him despite the injury. I’m just looking forward to the chance to see him hit again.”
The Eagles recovered, too. They went on to win 33 games, just four short of their tally in their run to the 2011 SoCon championship.

They were led offensively by a pair of upper classmen – senior Eric Phillips and junior Michael Burruss – who were the only Eagles to start all 60 games in 2012 and combined for 166 hits and 90 RBIs.

Phillips batted .391 on the season, finished his career with an astounding .366 batting average and set
the Georgia Southern record for career hits with 339, a record that may or may not stand the test of time.
“You never know,” said Hennon. “I say it time and time again, but Eric is just a very good baseball player. He’s not the best prospect, necessarily, with the best tools, but he’s just the total package as a player. I can’t think of anybody being more complete as a player that I’ve coached in the last 13 years at Georgia Southern.”

Phillips was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays in the sixth round of the MLB Draft.

“Eric played every game for four years at Georgia Southern, and he just had an unbelievable career,” Hennon added. “Everybody gets caught up in tools. They get caught up in power, they get caught up in the stopwatch, and he doesn’t have that one tool that jumps off the page at you. To really appreciate him, you have to see him play every day. To get drafted in the sixth round was quite an accomplishment for a guy who wasn’t drafted out of high school and had never been drafted before.”

Another huge help in the line-up came from an unexpected place. Freshman catcher Chase Griffin worked his way into the cleanup spot of the Eagles’ batting order, and finished the season batting .320 with 10 home runs.

“He went through some struggles earlier in the year just with the adjustments of playing at this level, but catcher is the most demanding position on the field, for a lot of reasons,” Hennon said about Griffin. “It’s not just what you have to do physically, but mentally there are a lot of responsibilities – calling each pitch, handling the pitching staff – and you really depend on your catcher to kind of be a quarterback out there. And we’re asking an 18-year-old freshman to step in there and do it. The more he played, the more comfortable he got.”

On the mound, the Eagles turned to their ace right-handed pitcher with the high-velocity fastball, junior Chris Beck, and to junior Justin Hess, who emerged as the Saturday starter.

Beck’s fastball got him drafted in the second round by the Chicago White Sox, and Hess used his control and his nasty curveball to secure a spot at the top of Georgia Southern’s rotation.

“You don’t have to throw 95 to get people out,” Hennon said about Hess. “You’ve got to be able to pitch.”
Beck and Hess each made two appearances during Georgia Southern’s championship-game run.

Jarret Leverett, the hard-throwing left-handed pitcher, made three relief appearances in the SoCon tournament, and became the fourth Eagle called in 2012 when he was drafted in the 15th round by the Minnesota Twins.

The Eagles outscored their opponents 37-9 in the first three games of the tournament, and only showed a sign of slowing down during Elon’s six-run seventh inning in the semifinals, a game the Eagles won 10-7.

“I thought we played our best baseball of the year during those four games in Greenville,” Hennon said. “We had the one bad inning in that third game against Elon, but other than that, we played some really good baseball.”