By Brendan Holba
(The views of Brendan Holba do not necessarily reflect those of Cardinal Sports Zone)
Louisville’s baseball program has long been a bastion of excellence. However, since COVID-19 shut down what was arguably Coach Mac’s best team in 2020, the Louisville Cardinals have not regained their powerhouse status. Despite sweeping Notre Dame on the season’s final weekend, the Cardinals went 0-2 in the Conference Tournament in Charlotte and were absent from the NCAA Tournament on Selection Monday. This marks the third time in the last four seasons that Louisville has missed the tournament, an unprecedented situation for Coach McDonnell and his staff. After finishing seventh in a league that earned eight bids, the Cardinals must confront some hard truths or risk falling into college baseball obscurity.
Coach McDonnell has always adhered to his player development philosophy, and for more than a decade, his was the standard. There’s a reason why Louisville had more players on Major League Baseball Opening Day rosters this year than any other school in the country. But change is inevitable, and as Terrance Mann said in Field of Dreams, “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again.” At the moment, with the Portal, NIL, and Conference realignment, it feels like college athletics are being rolled by an army of steamrollers and rebuilt right before our eyes. Unfortunately, Mac has been slow to adjust to this change, understandably so – he did have the Midas touch for over a decade. And it’s not that he is flat-out refusing to use the portal like Tim Corbin at Vanderbilt. This year, he brought in key transfers: Sebastian Gongora, the 2023 Horizon League Pitcher of the Year, and Luke Napleton, the 2023 GLVC Player of the Year, and both were key contributors. But more guys like them are needed in the future. Coach Mac built it, and the players came, but now he needs to erase the board and build it again, or the program will be steamrolled, and someone else will be tasked with rebuilding it.
Five of Louisville’s nine players on MLB Opening Day rosters this year were pitchers. Once a strength of the program, the pitching staff again struggled with command and durability this season. An inability to find a dude or two to run out each game left us at a loss almost every weekend. Outside of Gongora and Evan Webster, most pitchers struggled with their command, leading them to force fastballs into the zone to stay competitive. But this doesn’t work at the top level of college baseball. Power five hitters are ready to hit a fastball; that’s how they got this far in their careers. When pitchers are forced to leave fastballs in the fat part of the zone, bad things happen, which happened far too often this year. From the outside, it’s hard to tell where exactly the changes need to come, but something has to change with the pitching because 2024 wasn’t just a once-off; the last few years have looked like this year.
This season had the potential to be special. After a sweep of NC State, a host team in this year’s tournament, they looked to be back on track, at least to get into the dance. But ultimately, they couldn’t overcome the same challenges that have persisted for the last four seasons—below-average pitching, average defense, and streaky hitting. Hopefully, after a thorough evaluation, the necessary changes will be made so that the 2025 season can restore Louisville baseball to its former glory.
