The unenviable situation Miami baseball is in as NCAA gets set to award regional sites

The Miami Hurricanes baseball program started the season on a No. 1 high after defeating the then top-ranked Florida Gators two out of three in Gainesville.

Today, the unranked Canes are struggling to win enough games to qualify for the NCAA tournament.

“If we don’t play well the remainder of the season that is absolutely possible,’’ UM coach Gino DiMare told the Miami Herald by phone Wednesday. “We have put ourselves in a poor position. But we can all of a sudden decide to play consistent baseball and put ourselves in a better one.’’

With 10 games to go in the regular season, beginning with a three-game series against Appalachian State (16-23, 7-8 Sun Belt) this weekend at Mark Light Field, the Hurricanes (24-15, 15-14 Atlantic Coast Conference) will learn early next week if their bid to be one of 16 NCAA regional host sites is accepted. If not, which could be the case as projections by baseball media outlets agree, then UM would travel for the regionals — that is, if it is one of the 64 teams selected for the tournament.

It would be embarrassing for the Canes, national champions in 1982, 1985, 1999 and 2001, to have to travel while their home site at Alex Rodriguez Park is putting on a regional for four other teams. But it would be worse to not make the tournament at all.

UM missed making the tournament in 2017 and ‘18 after a 44-year national-record streak. It returned to the tournament in 2019 and was ranked fifth with a 12-4 record when the NCAA canceled the 2020 season because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Oh jeez, that would be tough,’’ DiMare said of the prospect of traveling while Mark Light hosts a regional. “But hosting is not in my mind right now. My mind is trying to figure out a way to put a pitching staff together, a rotation together, a lineup together than can go out there and give us the best chance to be consistent. We need to play good baseball.’’

Unique regional situation

The reason for the possible unusual hosting situation is that the NCAA normally announces the 16 regional sites for the first round of the tournament the night before the field of 64 is announced live on ESPN on Memorial Day. But because of the pandemic, this year the bids had to be received by April 12 and the site decisions made before the regular season ends to give the locations time to organize COVID-19 testing protocols for the participating teams. Usually, the NCAA Division I Baseball Committee would have the entire season to evaluate before choosing its sites, so it would know a host site would also, in the overwhelming majority of cases, have its home team as a top regional seed.

After the regional games are played the first weekend of June, eight super-regional sites will be selected from the 16 regional sites. The College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, begins June 19.

The Canes, inconsistent in every phase of the game, do have two consistently strong players: outfielder Christian Del Castillo, a redshirt junior transfer with a team-leading .365 batting average and team-high 54 hits (and the older brother of first-round draft prospect Adrian); and closer Carson Palmquist (1-0, 1.48 ERA), tied for third in the nation with 10 saves.

Plagued by inconsistency

UM was swept by Florida State (23-16, 15-12) and Pitt (20-11, 14-10) and lost two of three to Virginia Tech (23-17, 16-14) and to North Carolina (20-21, 14-16) and Boston College (19-22, 8-19) the past two weekends. The Canes have three-game ACC sweeps against Clemson (21-18, 15-12) and Duke (18-18, 9-15) and a two-game sweep of Wake Forest.

Miami won eight of nine from March 23 through April 7, but has since gone 7-7.

DiMare has used seven different pitching rotations, with opening day starter Daniel Federman (4-4, 5.00) now doing well as a middle reliever.

Offensively, Miami is hitting .267 as a team.

“At the end of the day this is not where I expected us to be,’’ said DiMare, whose freshman players were part of the No. 1 recruiting class by multiple outlets. “It’s been a lot of insconsistency from a lot of players and that’s the bottom line. We’ve played some freshmen in the lineup, but this is a team game and veteran guys haven’t had the year we would have hoped for up to this point.”

Conference conundrum

This year the ACC added two weekend league series to each team’s schedule, thus cutting down on the nonconference opponents. UM has won all seven of its mid-week, nonconference games (plus the two of three from Florida), but is only one game above .500 in the ACC.

UM athletic director Blake James said Tuesday on the ACC Network’s Packer & Durham Show that the nonconference games are crucial in helping ACC teams boost their ability to qualify for regionals, as opposed to beating each other in the regular season.

“My only hesitation is, we’re losing half the games we play against each other,’’ James said. “If we’re playing more ACC games, we’re going to go .500. We opened this season in Gainesville against the University of Florida [and] against a great SEC opponent we take two out of three games. That’s good for the league.

“Mid-week we’re playing Florida Gulf Coast, FIU, FAU — all those wins are good for the league. ...It’s really important for us as strong baseball programs, and that’s where our league is, that we schedule strong nonconference competition. It’s critical to really ensure that we get as many deserving ACC teams in the postseason as possible.”

Said DiMare: “The good news is there’s still more games to be played” — including the ACC tournament May 25-30 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

More good news: The Canes are tied with the ACC’s Notre Dame for the league’s most overall wins, have the nation’s 22nd-highest RPI of 293 Division I teams, and have the nation’s 28th-ranked strength of schedule.

“We can figure it out,’’ DiMare said. “But we need to figure it out quick.’’