By Marissa Scott
The 2018 season brought many questions for the SJSU baseball team.
Who would be the starting pitchers? Who will be the head coach? How will the team improve from last year?
There were so many unanswered questions, except for one — Brad Sanfilippo.
Sanfilippo, a UC Davis alumnus and former baseball coach for Los Gatos High School was offered the interim head coach position after SJSU’s former head coach Jason Hawkins resigned.
From an assistant coach at Cal Berkeley to an interim head coach of a third-place San Jose State baseball team, Sanfilippo has made his mark on Bay Area baseball.
In the 2018 Mountain West Conference preseason poll, the Spartans were predicted to finish dead last in the standings.
Fifty four games later, they sit in the No. 3 spot with their only winning conference record since they joined in 2014.
“I don’t know if you can put too much stock into how people think you’re going to do,” Sanfilippo said. “At the end of the day it doesn’t have anything to do with how you’re actually going to do.”
After the team’s first game and first win, the coach acknowledged the hardships the team went through early in the year, but he had faith in his squad.
“This team has been through some adversity up to this point and we hadn’t even played yet,” Sanfilippo said after the first game.
“To get out on the field and actually play baseball and to have an opportunity to be down early and to come back and to have a lot of different guys contribute to it, that’s a pretty good first game,” Sanfilippo said.
The Spartans were off to a solid start.
Through their first nine games, the team went 5-4 and were starting to prove they could play quality baseball against quality opponents.
After their win against Cal Poly on Feb. 27, the team went on a 5-15 run, hitting the mid-season wall and fell to last place in the conference standings.
April 8, 2018 was the day the Spartans turned their season around.
The team won 16 of their final 25 games and climbed from No. 7 to No. 3 in a month-and-a-half.
“Going down the way we did at the beginning of the month was hard,” said senior left fielder Brett Bautista. “Coach Flip just told us to grab a shovel and start digging. To be able to play good baseball the last month-and-a-half has been good for us.”
During that six-week span, the Spartans went 7-1 at home and managed to snag three walk-off wins. They also went 5-0-1 in their final six series.
“We’ve been through a ton of adversity, in my time here and in years before that as well,” said junior shortstop Aaron Pleschner. “It feels awesome to overcome that and play the baseball that we know we’ve always been able to play.”
For the seniors, it is the first year they have been one of the hottest teams in the conference going into the tournament.
“It’s just our story, it’s great,” Sanfilippo said. “The guys are great with adversity, they’re really tough, they believe in each other, they trust their coaches and they never give up. All those things are reflected in how we finished.”
Although people praise coaches for the successes of a team often, Sanfilippo said the group wouldn’t be where they are without the dedication of the players.
“As a coach you’re just really proud of the effort and proud of those guys that were able to get us here,” Sanfilippo said.
Sanfilippo and the team will head down to San Diego to play in their first Mountain West Championship Tournament against San Diego State Thursday night at 6 p.m.
Follow Marissa on Twitter @marissascotttt