Thx Mountaineer fans who followed us this year. Wait til next year, that committee has our whole team fired up now! Our mission has begun!

— Coach Randy Mazey (@CoachMazey) May 31, 2016

The season has been over for a while now, and not much has changed in Randy Mazey’s mind. West Virginia is still pretty peeved about being three outs away from a NCAA tournament automatic bid and then three spots away from an at-large bit.

The Mountaineers, who went 17-4 down the stretch and thinned their RPI from No. 119 to No. 60, believed they should have been invited, and nothing has happened to change that.

“I think exactly what I thought at the time,” the WVU coach said. “Obviously, finishing in fourth place in the Big 12 means a lot more than people thought it did, because the three teams that got in ahead of us all won their regionals. The Big 12’s record is 9-1 [in NCAA regionals]. From the committee’s standpoint, I guess the Big 12 is a little underrated, which just proves that I think we deserved to get in.”

So motivated WVU transitions into the offseason, and the throwing sessions and batting cage exhibitions, the summer leagues and the fall season, they’ll all be filled with postseason perspiration and aspirations.

But there’s a monkey wrench, and it’s flying WVU’s way. Today is the first day of the three-day, 40-round Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft, and it could put a hurting on the Mountaineers.

True, that was a team that relied upon freshmen and sophomores for so much of the productivity, and it was a team that had but four seniors: starter Ross Vance, reliever Jeff Hardy, closer Blake Smith and outfielder K.C. Huth. Only six others are eligible for the draft, but get a load of the names: No. 1 starter and first-team all-conference Chad Donato, first baseman Jackson Cramer, catcher Ray Guerrini, outfielder/bench bat Shaun Wood and relievers Jackson Sigman and Brandon Boone.

They were all, to some degree relative to their role, valuable to very valuable to most valuable parts of the team.

A few of them are getting drafted, and then it’s up to them, plus whatever feelings and advice they choose to summon and weigh, to decide to stay or go. But there’s even more at stake than just that, as large as that could be.

The recruiting class is very good, as good as Mazey has had here, as good as WVU has had in a long, long time. Every one of the players is draft-eligible, and Mazey knows four or five — or, for all he knows, a few more — could get the call soon, and that can change all of the momentum and optimism that’s presently headed toward 2017.

“This group is different from last year’s group because last year’s group had a lot of great baseball players,” Mazey said. “Darius Hill, Ivan Vera, Kyle Gray, they weren’t prospects on the professional scale. They were just really good baseball players. We weren’t worried about the draft with those guys. This year’s class, we’ve got some draft issues as to whether we’re going to get these guys or not.”

It’s a group good enough to keep Mazey’s program moving forward. It’s also a group good enough to lose some players to the pros over the next few days, though Mazey, it seemed, hinted that some of his recruits made it clear to pro teams they were not interested in skipping college.

The top concern is Alek Manoah, a 6-6, 245-pound first baseman/pitcher from Miami. On signing day in November, Mazey said Manoah “has the chance to be one of the best players to ever play at West Virginia as both a pitcher and a hitter.”

Kevin Brophy is a 6-3 infielder with a smooth left-handed swing. Jordan Scott is a switch-hitting outfielder who has speed, power and defense, as well as athleticism in his blood. His father played football at Alabama and his uncle played in the NFL. Isaiah Kearns is a 6-1 pitcher and third baseman who’s considered one of the best pro or college prospects in Pennsylvania.

They could all be picked, and there are others who might have had one good day or one good trait that a scout happened to see.

“Since we don’t get to play anymore, as coaches, this is the competitive side of it that we love,” Mazey said. “We’ve got four or five guys on our current team that we’re talking with and four or five guys coming in who we feel like have a chance. That’s a big difference. That’s maybe 10 more guys on your team who are really good players or 10 more guys not on your team.”

You can follow along when the picks begin at 6 p.m.