Baseball
Main article: Kansas State Wildcats baseball See also: 2010 Kansas State Wildcats baseball teamKansas State's baseball team began play in 1897. The Wildcats earned what is believed to be the school's first varsity championship in 1907 under coach Mike Ahearn. The Wildcats went on to win a Missouri Valley Conference championship in 1928 and Big Six Conference championships in 1930 and 1933.
Other milestones in the team's history include Earl Woods, the father of golfer Tiger Woods, becoming the first African-American baseball player in the Big Seven Conference in 1952, as well as all-time coaching wins leader Mike Clark winning the Big Eight Coach of the Year award in 1990.
The Wildcats have not traditionally been competitive on the national scale, but in 2009 the team made its first appearance in the NCAA Tournament. Kansas State has qualified four times for the Big 12 Conference tournament since its formation in 1996. The most recent appearance came in 2009. The Wildcats also earned a berth in the Big 12 Conference tournament in 2002, 2007, and 2008. In 2008, Hill led the Wildcats all the way to the championship game against Texas, eventually falling 15–7, just one win shy of their first tournament championship.
Hill's teams have also earned the school's first national rankings in the USA Today/ESPN Coach's Poll in the 2009 and 2010 seasons. The Wildcats call Tointon Family Stadium home.
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Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“Spooky things happen in houses densely occupied by adolescent boys. When I checked out a four-inch dent in the living room ceiling one afternoon, even the kid still holding the baseball bat looked genuinely baffled about how he possibly could have done it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)