West Virginia’s baseball team went 1-2 against No. 4 Texas Tech over the weekend, but it was apparently beyond “encouraging” for the Mountaineers.

“That’s the most gross understatement I’ve ever heard,” Mazey said. “That’s as good a weekend as we could have had under the circumstances.”

WVU lost two one-run games Saturday and won a one-run game Sunday (Manoah!). The Red Raiders lead the Big 12 in pretty much every offensive category and managed seven runs, a .250 average and three hits in 24 at-bats with runners in scoring position in the series.

Remember, the Mountaineers are short on pitchers. In the finale, which they needed to win because their next six games won’t do much for the RPI, they turned to Manoah, who was the closer not long ago, a reliever who pitched two innings Saturday and seems to pitch in every game, another reliever who started the game as the designated hitter and the day’s closer who couldn’t get an out against TCU last month. (Aside: Games Tuesday and Wednesday against Penn State are going to be interesting.)

Things are all right, and WVU really only needs to keep the bed dry in the final nine games of the regular season. Texas Tech jumped to No. 3 in the RPI, because beating WVU means that much. The Mountaineers are No. 13. They’re 28-19 (with a kind stretch coming up) and 11-10 in the Big 12, and they finish the regular season with a three-game series at Texas, which is No. 22 in the RPI. Obviously, WVU wants to get as far as possible from .500, which makes these next six games so important, but it would help to do the same with the Big 12 record. Remember, the Mountaineers could still be a top-16 seed nationally and serve as a regional host.

And to think, on a random Wednesday on November 2011, Oliver Luck convened a baseball summit with nine expert guests, and together they addressed a simple and significant question: Should WVU continue playing baseball?

“I wouldn’t say we were close to making a decision,” said Luck, who today is the executive vice president of regulatory affairs for the NCAA, “but it’s something that if we were being intellectually honest we had to ask.”

Luck never intended to make a decision that day. The plan was to field opinions from the guests like grounders from a fungo bat and then use it all to make an informed — and perhaps controversial — call about the future.

Today, baseball is thriving at WVU.

“They approached it the right way,” said one of the guests, Graham Rossini, who was once the director of baseball operations at Arizona State and today is a vice president with the Arizona Diamondbacks and works on special projects and fan experience. “They brought in people with different viewpoints and back stories, and that way everyone could weigh in with his own experiences, whether as a player, an executive or somebody connected with the university, to generate valuable feedback.

“In anything I do, I like a bunch of different perspectives and a bunch of different ideas, even if somebody takes a contrarian point of view. It’s sometimes nice to challenge the group. But if you have one chance to do it, make sure you do it right and use the resources and the voices you have available to you to make it an experience you can learn from.”