Not that we should doubt him or his ability to turn frowns upside down at the end of a season filled with smiles.

Remember, he thought it was a wonderful development the Big 12 coaches unanimously selected his team to finish in last place.

“Fellas,” Mazey said, “I’ve got some really good news I want to share with you. Everyone in the league voted you last place. Nobody thinks you can do anything. They think you’re by far the worst team in the league. And that’s really good for us. If people underestimate what the Mountaineers are capable of this year, that could be dangerous for them.”

“We prepared the guys accordingly,” said Mazey, the former TCU assistant who welcomes familiar faces beginning with tonight’s first pitch at 6:30 p.m. “It wasn’t like the schedule was a surprise to us. We knew how much travel there would be going into it.

“I think adversity is easier to overcome if you prepare guys for it. We went into this thing knowing it was going to be a grind academically and with being on the road in hotels and buses, but we made the decision before the season started how we were going to handle that. Nothing has been a real shock to us.”

And there was that time, a day after warning his team about the trappings of success, when he thought a 6-0 deficit in a loss to Pitt following a season-altering Big 12 sweep at Kansas was just divine.

“I congratulated everyone for doing exactly what I asked them to do,” he said. “Every time I’ve given this team a challenge, it has responded. So after the Pitt game, we said like we say all the time: Don’t get caught up in the result, get caught up in the process. They came into the Pitt game with energy and enthusiasm and played hard.

“They scored one more run than we did. That doesn’t overshadow the fact we were coming off a huge conference weekend and we showed up to play. I left that game feeling better about the team than I did when that game started.”

So Saturday’s pep talk should have been expected…

WVU got smoked over the weekend. The Mountaineers won a pitcher’s dual Friday, 2-0, thanks to a TCU gaffe and two unearned runs … but that ought not dismiss Harrison Musgrave’s ridiculousness.

Later in the day, TCU took a 6-0 lead in the first inning and was mostly in control of a 7-4 win (“I was really pleased with our effort today,” coach Randy Mazey says.) before erupting Sunday in a way its offense hadn’t all season. The Horned Frogs hadn’t scored more than eight runs in a Big 12 game, but pounded WVU 16-6, scoring more runs in a game than they had in most series.

WVU is now in second place in the Big 12 and trails Kansas State by two games. The league title is most likely out of reach as the regular season ends next weekend at Oklahoma State.

Cue Mazey!

“I was just telling the team that who would have ever thought that with one weekend left to go in the season, that we’d still have an opportunity to win the Big 12 (regular season),” Mazey said. “We thought getting into this league that we were facing something that was pretty insurmountable.

“But from the way they’ve played the entire season to how hard they’ve grinded it out, they’ve climbed almost to the top of the mountain. And we’ve got an opportunity now with three games to go, to get to the top.

“These next 10 days for Mountaineer baseball are going to be pretty important and I couldn’t be prouder of where we are right now.”

Here’s how things conclude for WVU — and it’s going to test this team in a way it hasn’t been tested yet. The Mountaineers play Marshall Tuesday evening in Beckley and have an early-morning flight Wednesday from Pittsburgh to Oklahoma City for the series in Stillwater. They’ll stay out there for the three days between the final game of that series and the start of the Big 12 Tournament.