Hawaii baseball: Rainbow Warriors picked sixth in Big West
The Hawaii baseball team was selected to finish sixth place in the Big West Conference in 2020, the league announced Wednesday.
That matches the Rainbow Warriors’ highest preseason prediction in eight years of Big West membership.
Perennial contender Cal State Fullerton was picked to win the league in a vote of the BWC’s nine head coaches.
UH was also picked to finish sixth in 2019, as well. The Rainbow Warriors were 7-6 in BWC play at one point before dropping 10 of their last 11 conference games to finish 8-16 and 20-30 overall. They tied with UC Riverside and Long Beach State at the bottom of the league.
The Rainbows’ best Big West records to date are 12-12 in 2015 and 2016.
UH, which was crippled by injuries last year, has Dustin Demeter and Adam Fogel back healthy. Demeter missed the entire 2019 season and Fogel went out with a season-ending injury a handful of games into the season.
Well, in a giant nutshell, this is what you can refer to as a “Do-or-Die” situation with Coach Trap. After last year where it was bedlam to injuries to some key players, returners and pitchers, there wasn’t one clear set of lineup that was healthy. Worse than that, the problem last year was the lack of producing runs, especially with guys on base. The loss to Fogel afflicted everybody on the team and they didn’t play to the best of their abilities. Because they lost Dylan Thomas to the MLB draft, now the concern looms large to the pitching core on finding a reliever.
That being said, Trap now finds himself pocketed behind the 8 ball and pressure is on him to turn this season around. 2019 had Trap suffer through 2 6-game losing streaks and the team just couldn’t recover from that point on. Now, with Demeter and Fogel possibly returning, the question becomes if Trap will be staying around after this. He might have a chance of staying if either of these things were to happen with him:
1) Get a winning conference record [And something higher than 5th]
2) Get a winning record overall [Which he did in 2017 & 2018, despite losing conference records]
3) Getting his team to win the BWC title and qualify for the NCAA [Which hasn’t been done since 2010]
In essence, Trap is under a load of pressure, and this is, by Ferd Lewis, possibly, could be the final time he could be seeing Les Murakami Stadium. Matlin gave him a second chance to fix this, now it’s up to Trap to see if he can get back on track. It’s clear that he cannot have serious injuries to key players, pitchers and returners during the season, otherwise we’re going to see a re-run of the 2019 season. Let’s see what Coach Trap has got us for to start in this new decade.