Kentucky baseball’s Nick Mingione has gone from the hot seat to NCAA Tournament success
.jpg "UK baseball coach Nick Mingione, left with Wildcats pitcher Darren Williams, has his team in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2017.")
To be honest, I thought Nick Mingione was a goner.
Kentucky’s head baseball coach had gone from reaching a super regional in 2017 and winning SEC Coach of the Year honors for his first season on the job, to not much after that. UK had missed four straight NCAA tournaments. It had suffered four straight losing SEC seasons. It didn’t have much to show for its new $49 million ballpark.
Surely, it was time for a change.
And yes, things have changed all right.
After Kentucky’s 4-0 win over Ball State on Friday in its first game of the NCAA Tournament at Kentucky Proud Park, the Cats entered Saturday night’s game against West Virginia in need of just two more wins to make it back to a super regional for the first time since 2017.
All with the relentlessly positive Mingione still the head coach.
“This is a special group,” the 44-year-old said after Friday’s win. “This is a special group.”
A special group that has put together a special season. Friday’s win improved Kentucky to 37-18 overall. After a 9-1 start in SEC play, the Cats ended up 16-14 in the nation’s toughest league and No. 2 in the NCAA’s RPI rankings behind Wake Forest, all of which allowed the program to host its first regional in six years.
The difference? After the 2022 season ended with a second consecutive 12-18 mark in league play, and a No. 12 seed in the SEC Tournament, Mingione added 12 players from the transfer portal. Five were in Friday’s starting lineup — first baseman Hunter Gilliam (Longwood), shortstop Grant Smith (Incarnate Word), catcher Chase Stanke (Minnesota), center fielder Jackson Gray (Western Kentucky) and left fielder Ryan Waldschmidt (Charleston Southern).
Gray hit .363 for the season with 15 doubles and tied for the team lead in stolen bases with 19. Gilliam hit .330 and led the team in homers with 11. Smith played stellar at shortstop, including a pair of nice plays on Friday. Same for Stanke.
In fact, Kentucky’s rise from conference doormat to as high as No. 10 in the polls was built on pitching, defense and a “small-ball” type of offense that Mingione dubbed as “mass chaos” before the season started.
It worked. The Cats finished fifth in the SEC in team ERA behind pitching coach Dan Roszel and second in the conference in stolen bases, trailing only Texas A&M.
Pitching was Friday’s star. Starter Grant Smith pitched four innings of three-hit, scoreless baseball. After that, former Rowan County star Mason Moore threw five perfect innings, using just 50 pitches to record his 15 outs.
“Travis Smith, what an outing for him. Got us going,” Mingione said. “The job that Mason did after that was just incredible.”
The turnaround job by the head coach ranks right up there, as well.
“Someone asked Thomas Edison one time what it felt like to fail 10,000 times when he was trying to invent the light bulb,” Mingione said last week. “His answer was I never failed one time. It just happened to be a 10,000-step process. That’s how I feel about here … It’s just been a process. We’ve been close. I talked about that on media day. I wanted it so bad for those other teams. Two out of the last three years we’ve been one or two wins away.”
Not this year. The wins have been there. And Mingione also said something Friday, complimenting the crowd of 4,935 that showed up at KPP, that resonated.
“When you have people in your corner, it’s amazing what it can do to guys,” the coach said.
Mitch Barnhart was the man in Mingione’s corner. The UK AD stuck with the head coach. His reasoning: “I look at all the things he’s done within our program, the way that our young people conduct themselves. … The integrity of the way he runs our program, no issues.”
The hope was the wins would follow. This year they have. And then some. Keeping Nick Mingione was the right move.
