Even after a run to the Super Regional last year and plenty of key pieces back, Kentucky found itself outside the preseason Top 25 rankings from D1Baseball. To Nick Mingione, his team looked the part of a top-25 program before the year.
Fast-forward to Friday night, and Kentucky clinched at least a share of the SEC title with a chance to win it outright on Saturday. During the series finale against Vanderbilt, SEC Network analyst Chris Burke asked Mingione about being on the outside of the preseason rankings, and the coach said he hadn’t heard that question yet.
While he didn’t necessarily think UK would win the conference, he still thought the Bat Cats were plenty good enough to jump into the Top 25.
“We had enough guys back that we thought we had a chance to be good,” Mingione said during the fourth inning Saturday. “I thought we were gonna be a preseason top-25 team. You’re the first person to bring that up. I was a little surprised that we weren’t. And then, all of a sudden – because if you look at our field, we do have a couple guys that are from the transfer portal in our lineup. You just don’t know how those guys are going to be.
“So for me to say like ‘Yeah, I felt like we’re gonna win the league,’ I did not think that just because I know the difficulty of it.”
Kentucky notably had Mason Moore, Travis Smith and Ryan Hagenow back on the mound, but also returned Ryan Waldschmidt and added Nick Lopez from the transfer portal. When looking at pieces to bring in, Nick Mingione said it was about making everything work together.
And although he said he’s not a very good cook, he compared putting a roster together to a recipe.
“We had pieces,” Mingione said. “We had Mason, we had Travis, we had Hagenow – we had a bunch of guys back that were good, strong pieces. But until you know, it’s like – I talk about our team a lot like a good recipe. … When you have a good recipe, you can’t be all the same ingredients. You have to have a bunch of different pieces and it’s like, wow. Then, all of a sudden, there’s this unbelievable melody of flavors. But you don’t know how that’s going to work with your team. You bring all these guys in and you’re trying to build something, you’re trying to do all that, and you just don’t know.
“And it was clear early in the fall that the guys that had come back were super hungry. They had been to a Super and they wanted to do more. And the guys that were here, that came in, they watched us on TV. … And we eventually get beat by the national champion, but our guys just felt like there was more meat on the bone. They did an unbelievable job welcoming those guys in and the guys that quite frankly had been in our program, they got better. They got better. … So these guys have all gotten better. So then, as a result, here, here’s what we have.”
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