FROM CBB NEWS SOURCE
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. – Eleven games against Pacific-10 Conference teams and three-game home series against USC, Houston, California, Long Beach State and UC Irvine highlight the 2010 Cal Poly baseball schedule announced Tuesday by head coach Larry Lee and director of athletics Alison Cone.
The Mustangs will open the 2010 campaign, Lee’s eighth as head coach at Cal Poly, with a three-game set against the Southern California Trojans on Feb. 19-21 in Baggett Stadium.
Cal Poly also hosts the Cal Bears on March 19-21, visits UCLA for a three-game series March 25-27 and will play Arizona State and Oregon State in the Coca-Cola Classic hosted by the City of Surprise, Ariz., in Surprise Stadium, the spring training home of the Texas Rangers and Kansas City Royals.
The Mustangs will host four Big West series, including Long Beach State on April 30 through May 2 and UC Irvine on May 7-9. In all, Cal Poly will play 29 of its 56 games in Baggett Stadium.
The schedule also includes 10 midweek games against some of the best teams from the West Coast and Western Athletic conferences.
“Our 2010 schedule will be very challenging with 11 games against the likes of the best the Pac-10 has to offer and strong midweek games versus Pepperdine, Fresno State and Loyola Marymount,” said Lee.
Other three-game sets at home include non-conference games against Houston and Cal State Bakersfield and Big West series against UC Santa Barbara and Pacific. The Mustangs also host Northern Illinois for two games March 9-10.
The 2009 Cal Poly baseball season will go into the Mustang record book as one of the most successful campaigns, thanks in large part to the achievement of its first NCAA regional playoff berth at the NCAA Division I level.
The Mustangs won 37 games (one shy of the school’s Division I mark), finished third in the Big West Conference, compiled a .325 team batting average, posted their fifth winning season in the last six years, cracked the 30-win mark for the seventh time in the last 10 seasons and earned a spot in the national polls for 13 consecutive weeks.
Lee is now 223-175-2 overall in seven seasons at the helm of the Cal Poly program.
The Mustangs, who finished third in the Big West, produced a pair of eight-game winning streaks last season, another six-game string of victories and a national ranking as high as No. 12 by both Baseball America and Collegiate Baseball Newspaper. The Mustangs, who won 11 of 14 weekend series.
Cal Poly won eight of its first nine games and 17 of 21 for its best start since the 1997 squad went 18-2 to open the year. The Mustangs won 13 more games than they did in all of 2008 and were 20 games above the .500 mark three times last season — 30-10, 32-12 and 37-17 — and only the fourth time since moving to Division I 15 years ago. The 2004 squad was 33-13-1 in mid-April. Twenty is still the school’s Division I record.
Cal Poly has had 14 players selected in the first 10 rounds of the last six Major League Baseball drafts (2004-09), including fourth-round pick Adam Buschini, and a total of 29 players drafted overall. Three other Mustangs signed free-agent contracts with Major League organizations and three more signed deals with independent league teams.
