West Virginia baseball bows out of Big 12 Championship after two losses to open tournament

West Virginia baseball's string of bad luck at the Big 12 Championship continued this week as they dropped a 5-2 decision to TCU on Tuesday before suffering an 8-4 defeat at the hands of Kansas State in an elimination game, ending their conference title hopes.

With the loss, WVU continues an unfortunate trend -- they are now 0-6 at the conference championship in their last three appearances. The Mountaineers have lost their first two games in the double-elimination bracket every season since 2022. They will now have to hope for an at-large bid to the 2024 NCAA Tournament, though head coach Randy Mazey didn't seem concerned about their chances of missing that

"I'm not going to talk about the positives like the season is over, because we're going home tomorrow and we're going to practice, play intersquads, and get ready for next weekend," Mazey said. "If I didn't think we were playing next weekend, we wouldn't go home and practice tomorrow."

Cold bats hindered the Mountaineers against TCU as they recorded just three hits in that game to TCU's nine. They looked to remedy that as they matched Kansas State seven hits to seven hits at the plate, including a three-hit first inning that saw them take a 3-0 lead. However, Kansas State would rack up a massive seven-run fourth inning to take a lead in the fourth inning that the Mountaineers were unable to bounce back from.

"We just gave them too many free passes in that seven-run inning," Mazey said.

As of Monday, WVU was projected as a No. 2-seed for the NCAA Tournament in a potential Charlottesville region hosted by Virginia. The Mountaineers could potentially drop due to the poor conference tournament performance, but they would need to be surpassed by quite a few teams in order to fall out of the NCAA postseason altogether.