ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – No baseball program since Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office has enjoyed a run of excellent hitting like the University of New Mexico Lobos have over the last seven years. Since 1998 the Lobos are the only team in Division I to finish in the top 10 in batting in six of seven years.
With their likely sixth-place finish this season (official statistics won’t be completed until after the conclusion of the College World Series next week), the Lobos have also finished in the top 10 in four straight seasons, which has been accomplished just one other time since the Berlin Wall was still standing. Southern University did it from 2001-04 when it had future Major Leagure Rickie Weeks (who hit an NCAA record .473 for his career) in its lineup.
In head coach Ray Birmingham’s eight years on campus, the Lobos have failed to crack the NCAA’s top 10 just twice: in 2008, which was his first season, and in 2011, when they did not have a single senior hitter and faced a brutal non-conference schedule.
UNM has finished sixth, fifth, first, fifth, eighth and first since 2009. Only three other schools in the entire nation (Southeast Missouri State, Campbell and New Mexico State) have as many as three finishes in the top 10, which means the Lobos have been among the 10 best-hitting teams in the country as many times as any two other teams in the country combined since Birmingham’s arrival.
In 2008, Birmingham’s first year in Albuquerque, the Lobos hit .314, but that was good for just 53rd in the country. It was during the height of the offensive explosion in college baseball that saw Fresno State win a College World Series championship series game 19-10.
However, it only took Birmingham a year to make his mark, as in 2009 the Lobos hit .363, which is the third highest team average in the last decade, bested only by Utah Valley (.372) and Pittsburgh (.365) in 2010. UNM had four players hit .400 or better that year: Rafael Neda (.415), Mike Brownstein (.414), Ryan Honeycutt (.406) and Kevin Atkinson (.400). Oh and Brian Cavazos-Galvez hit .392, missing out on being the fifth by just two hits.
The very next year the Lobos hit “only” .346 to finish eighth in the nation, but Justin Howard led the country with a .456 average, including a staggering .497 mark at home. That also happened to be the final year with the old metal bats before the introduction of the BBCOR bats in 2011., which coincided with UNM’s only down year, but the Lobos bounced back in 2012 to finish fifth with a .326 mark.
In 2013 the Lobos led the nation for the second time in five years with a .334 average, which was a full 12 points higher than any other team. They were so good that their average of .302 in road games would have been the 27th best in the country. Of course, the Lobos bolstered their average by hitting .371 at home, led by Mitch Garver’s .491 mark. For the season they had three players rank in the top 21 in individual batting: DJ Peterson (fourth, .408), Garver (14th, .390), and Luke Campbell (21st, .385).
The last two seasons, despite having just two senior hitters on each team — Chase Harris and John Pustay in 2014, and Aaron Siple and Ryan Padilla in 2015 — the Lobos again continued to hit, posting averages of .312 and .310 in ’14 and ’15, respectively, with young squads.
2015 was a perfect example of this. Senior Aaron Siple led the team with a .354 average, but the other six qualified hitters, each of whom hit .297 or above, were all freshmen and sophomores. That bodes well for the Lobos extending their streak to five straight top-10 finishes in 2016. Danny Collier and Jack Zoellner will be juniors next season and are career .349 and .330 hitters, respectively.
Over this same period Lobo hitters have been named All-America 10 times, plus an additional seven that earned Freshmen All-America honors.
Since 2011 the Lobos lead the nation in team batting at .311, and over the last four years it’s even better at .321.
If UNM had a coach that wasn’t as old-school and blue-collar as Birmingham, it might start calling itself something flashier like Hitters U.
Don’t expect that from a Birmingham-coached team any time in the near future, though. Just expect the Lobos to keep on hitting and ranking near the nation’s best year after year.