If ever there was a sport where the phrase "fair-weather fan" comes into play, it's baseball.
Especially in West Virginia.
Folks are interested in supporting their teams, sure. But, um, it was 46 degrees at game time for Tuesday's WVU-Marshall showdown, won by the Mountaineers 5-4 in 10 innings. Most of the seating was in the shade at Appalachian Power Park.
Lots of seats were available.
Soon, though, the weather will improve. WVU coach Randy Mazey is hoping his team will as well.
Until this past weekend, there were clouds over the Mountaineer season. The record was 12-10. The team had lost a pair to Canisius at home. (The second was by a 9-0 score.) Hope was fading.
Then, last Friday, WVU shocked then-No. 16 Oklahoma State in back-to-back games. (The Cowboys are now No. 19.) A little sunshine hit the program - much needed to set up the rest of the Mountaineers' season.
Matt Wells, the school's associate athletic director, said Tuesday the new stadium in Morgantown lifted attendance last season to 39th nationally. Never before had WVU been in the top 100. The average attendance was 1,801. Nearly 600 season tickets were sold.
But Wells knows. Yes, the move to the baseball-rich Big 12 brings quality opponents. But the bump of the new stadium will only last so long.
This season, WVU sold a little over 450 season tickets. The Mountaineers are averaging 1,264 fans so far in eight home games. (Displaced Marshall, by the way, has been averaging about 550 for its Charleston games and is in the low hundreds for games at the YMCA Kennedy Center field in Huntington.)
So soon WVU's baseball success will fall almost entirely back to Mazey.
I asked the coach what steps have been taken of late to elevate his program.
"We've built a stadium and that's the biggest change," he said. "We've settled into it a little more now. Last year we played in it, but didn't have a locker room, a place to go and talk to players. We'd just sit in the dugout and wait for the other team to finish hitting.
"Now we're a little more settled and, hopefully, it can turn into a pretty good home-field advantage for us."
What's the scoop in regard to recruiting?
"We've built a stadium," he repeated. "That sells itself. It's a beautiful place. It'll just take a little time for us to reap the rewards of it. We're recruiting sophomores and juniors in high school, so by the time they get to our place it'll be a while. That will be what changes the face of our program in the next four or five years."
It sounded much like his claim last season toward the end of April.
"It's a beautiful place," Mazey said at that time of the stadium. "With facilities like that, though, you don't reap the benefits until three or four years down the road. We're currently recruiting sophomores in high school. By the time they get to Morgantown it's three years from now and in that first year they're freshmen."
On Tuesday, I asked if there's any area in which WVU is particularly concentrating its recruiting.
"Earth," Mazey replied. "If we find a good player, man, we're going to try and make him a Mountaineer. Of course we'd like to dominate the state of West Virginia. If we feel we can find a good player that can play in the Big 12, we definitely want him to be a Mountaineer. Other than that, our recruiting has no boundaries."
Some shivering in the stands Tuesday might have been warmed that Mazey started the game with pitcher Michael Grove of Wheeling Park, a 6-foot-3, 190-pound right-handed freshman.
"I think we have four guys [on the roster] from the state," Mazey said. "That had a lot to do with why we started [Grove]. He knows the West Virginia-Marshall thing a little bit better than most of the guys."
Grove attended WVU's prospect camp last summer and caught the staff's attention. ("He threw the ball well and is athletic," Mazey said.)
The coach, by the way, was upbeat about the state of high school baseball in the Mountain State.
"It's good," he said. "It's better than people think. There are some good players in the state. It's such a big jump though from any high school ball to the Big 12. You have to be more than a good player. You have to be able to handle the academic jump, social jump and athletic jump."
We'll soon see if Mazey can parlay the stadium and jump in attendance into signing those kind of players.
And warm West Virginia's program up.