If you’ve kept up with college baseball this year, you’ve probably heard about Georgia’s third baseman Charlie Condon. For those who don’t know who he is and even for the ones who do, it’s worth mentioning what Condon has done this season.
Condon is a finalist for the Golden Spikes Award — the award given to the best player in college baseball — and will most likely win it after his historic season. He leads the NCAA in batting average (.445), home runs (36), slugging percentage (1.036) and OPS (1.602).
Those are video-game numbers but realistically that’s not even attainable in a video game. Last week in Georgia’s Regional, Condon hit a home run in his first at-bat against Army and that served as a warning to them and the rest of the region.
After Condon left the park in his first at-bat of the postseason he was mostly pitched around for the rest of the weekend. He was walked five times, including twice against Army and three times against Georgia Tech. Despite teams carefully pitching him, Condon still hit .500 during the regional.
NC State baseball head coach Elliott Avent compared how he’s hit to what Ryan Zimmerman did when he coached Team USA. He remembers him and another coach joking that Zimmerman was playing pinball that summer the way he was hitting the ball. Zimmerman hit .468 that summer which is slightly better than what Condon is doing but only hit four home runs which is much less than Condon. Either way that is high praise from Avent, comparing Condon to a World Series champion.
“I try not to look at it as much,” Avent said when asked about Condon’s stats. “I saw him a couple of times and that was enough. Quite impressive what he’s done.”
But what makes this Bulldogs team so dangerous is that if you do allow Condon on base he has guys behind him that can bring him home. There are five other players on the Bulldogs roster that have hit over 10 home runs and Georgia ranks third in the country with 145 long balls. In the Athens Regional, four different players launched a home run, including two from the ninth-hole hitter Kolby Branch.
“Nobody’s a one-man team,” Avent said. “When you talk about the 1927 Yankees, you talk about Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, you don’t think they didn’t have other people up and down that lineup? There’s never a one or two man wrecking crew. Georgia has a great ball club, up and down the lineup. We’re going to have to play well this weekend.”
So it is imperative that if NC State decides not to take its chances with Condon, that it is still careful with the rest of the Georgia lineup because everyone is capable of doing damage. But if Avent decides to attack Condon like any other batter, his pitchers will have to be sharp, and if they do make mistakes, make sure no one else is on base.
What will make it even harder to keep Georgia’s bats in the yard is that its home park — Foley Field – is very hitter-friendly and the players are used to playing there. The right field wall is just 314 feet but that may play right into the hands of the Wolfpack.
NC State boasts a starting lineup that is mostly made up of left-handed hitters or switch hitters meaning the right field wall is on their pull side. So if a Wolfpack player is in the left-hand batter’s box there is a high chance a decently hit ball will leave the park.
“The ball flies, that’s for sure,” said sophomore center fielder Eli Serrano III. “If you get the ball in the air, it kind of just goes. It’s fun, though. It’s kind of like a home run derby.”
While no one on this NC State roster has played at Foley Field, the Wolfpack baseball program has a history there. The last time Georgia hosted a Super Regional, NC State was its opponent. The opening game of this series marks the 16th anniversary of the game when the Bulldogs beat the Wolfpack 17-8 in a winner-take-all game to advance to the College World Series.
Despite the Bulldogs knocking out Avent’s team in 2008, he doesn’t use that as motivation this time around.
“You don’t get revenge in this world from me,” Avent said. “I don’t play with revenge or retribution. I never tell our guys to play with a chip on their shoulder. That’s not my style. You can practice with a chip on your shoulder and you can have memories in your past to make you work harder, prepare harder, and hopefully lead you to a good place.”
And this wasn’t Avent trying to take the high road or seem like he doesn’t care because when graduate third baseman Alec Makarewicz was asked if he knew about the 2008 matchup he had no idea about the history between the two squads.
As much as people will want to play up the series from 16 years ago, when these teams hit the field at noon on Saturday the only thing on their minds will be taking two out of three games, and if they do, they’ll be headed to Omaha for the College World Series.
