{"id":3823,"date":"2012-07-26T17:45:50","date_gmt":"2012-07-26T17:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/sites\/gsm_sum12\/?p=71"},"modified":"2014-06-02T14:59:05","modified_gmt":"2014-06-02T18:59:05","slug":"finishing-with-a-bang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/2012\/07\/26\/finishing-with-a-bang\/","title":{"rendered":"Finishing with a Bang"},"content":{"rendered":"

Georgia Southern\u2019s unlikely run to the Southern Conference (SoCon) baseball championship game \"base1\"<\/a>ended with four Eagles turning pro.<\/p>\n

It was as unlikely a matchup as one could have expected in the SoCon Tournament championship game.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought there were two teams in Greenville that really looked like they were on a mission, and that was us and Samford,\u201d 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. \u201cI thought both teams played great baseball all week, and obviously something had to give on Sunday.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.
\n\"base2\"<\/a>
\nDespite 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s a first-round talent, and he\u2019s proved that,\u201d said Hennon about the junior slugger. \u201cI\u2019m glad the Brewers had faith in him despite the injury. I\u2019m just looking forward to the chance to see him hit again.\u201d
\nThe Eagles recovered, too. They went on to win 33 games, just four short of their tally in their run to the 2011 SoCon championship.<\/p>\n

They were led offensively by a pair of upper classmen \u2013 senior Eric Phillips and junior Michael Burruss \u2013 who were the only Eagles to start all 60 games in 2012 and combined for 166 hits and 90 RBIs.<\/p>\n

Phillips batted .391 on the season, finished his career with an astounding .366 batting average and set
\nthe Georgia Southern record for career hits with 339, a record that may or may not stand the test of time.
\n\u201cYou never know,\u201d said Hennon. \u201cI say it time and time again, but Eric is just a very good baseball player. He\u2019s not the best prospect, necessarily, with the best tools, but he\u2019s just the total package as a player. I can\u2019t think of anybody being more complete as a player that I\u2019ve coached in the last 13 years at Georgia Southern.\u201d<\/p>\n

Phillips was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays in the sixth round of the MLB Draft.<\/p>\n

\u201cEric played every game for four years at Georgia Southern, and he just had an unbelievable career,\u201d Hennon added. \u201cEverybody gets caught up in tools. They get caught up in power, they get caught up in the stopwatch, and he doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t drafted out of high school and had never been drafted before.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019 batting order, and finished the season batting .320 with 10 home runs.
\n\"base3\"<\/a>
\n\u201cHe 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,\u201d Hennon said about Griffin. \u201cIt\u2019s not just what you have to do physically, but mentally there are a lot of responsibilities \u2013 calling each pitch, handling the pitching staff \u2013 and you really depend on your catcher to kind of be a quarterback out there. And we\u2019re asking an 18-year-old freshman to step in there and do it. The more he played, the more comfortable he got.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Beck\u2019s 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\u2019s rotation.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t have to throw 95 to get people out,\u201d Hennon said about Hess. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to be able to pitch.\u201d
\nBeck and Hess each made two appearances during Georgia Southern\u2019s championship-game run.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s six-run seventh inning in the semifinals, a game the Eagles won 10-7.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought we played our best baseball of the year during those four games in Greenville,\u201d Hennon said. \u201cWe had the one bad inning in that third game against Elon, but other than that, we played some really good baseball.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eagles Baseball Wins SoCon Championship<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3841,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[38],"class_list":["post-3823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-athletics","tag-summer-2012"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3823\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ww2.georgiasouthern.edu\/news\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}