MORGANTOWN — We think of a baseball coach — or manager, as he is known in the major leagues — as a man whose main function is running a ball game.

Who starts where? Who bats where in the line up? When is the right time to change pitchers? Should the batter bunt or hit and run?

But a coach or manager is far more than a strategist.

He lives in today and lives for tomorrow. He is a teacher and a parent. He is a psychologist and disciplinarian. He is hard and he is soft. He forbids and he forgives.

His job runs from dawn to darkness, always a game just behind him, a game ahead and in his hands is the future of not only himself and his familiar, but of those who play for him, all the while under the critical eye of the media and a fickle public which cheers him with each victory and curses him for each defeat.

Steve Sabins has spent a decade coaching at West Virginia but this is first year as the man in charge. To date it has been nothing but a elevator ride upward toward the penthouse, but his season has reach a critical time as he tries to put away a Big 12 regular season title, prepare for the conference tournament with an eye toward a regional berth in the NCAAs and hopefully a Super Regional and, while he’s at it, dreaming of leading the school to Omaha and the College World Series.

At the same time he is trying to keep his team on course, first as a group but just as importantly as individuals, each with different needs that must be filled, with different egos and different attitudes, a new challenge almost every hour.

Let’s allow him to take us through those challenges of this past weekend, one that began with a difficult loss in which he was ejected for the first time as a manager, where he faced injury on his team and where he guided through the rough spots to win two of three games.

Going up

As West Virginia went into the weekend they had just lost two straight games for the first time this season, led the Big 12 by three games and the talk was more openly being directed toward the postseason, something that he understands is best served by put on hold until the first job at hand is completed.

Can he defend such talk right now?

“As soon as you try to defend something you are not the owner of, you just get your butt kicked,” Sabins said. “That’s the truth. Try playing anything at a high level while tight or tense. It is no fun , first of all, and when you do that you are worse. The only option, weirdly, is to not care and put yourself in that mindset and just recognize how cool it is that we are even in that situation to begin with.”

See, they got on that elevator on the ground floor. New coach. Their best player, JJ Wetherholt, headed off on a professional career. Pitching uncertain.

He understands that a 39-7 record screams success but he would rather it whisper it for nothing has been settled.

He’s sold his players on that approach.

“They aren’t really result oriented and don’t fall into that syndrome of we are going to do this or are qualified for that,” he said. “They are wired that no matter what goes on around them, they feel they need to get better. That’s why we are in this position.”

They are taking one game, one at bat, one pitch at a time. That first two-game losing streak was a test and they passed it.

“We lose to Marshall and we lose the first game to Texas Tech, but going into that second game, nobody was thinking we had to win that game. No one was panicking,” second baseman Sam White said. “If you keep looking ahead and keep worrying about the past, it’s going to eat you alive. Just focus on the next game and control what we can control.”

No, they hadn’t been playing their best ball, but Sabins wasn’t worried about how they would respond to that.

“I think I’m past how they are going to respond,” he said. “In a coach’s role you always think you have a big piece of how they will respond. It’s like a search for what are we going to do and how to frame the situation before the game? Who are you going to reach out to? It’s a consistent and constant thought that fully consumes you from the minute you wake up until you go to bed.

“I always believe they will respond and that they are capable of responding and they obviously have nothing to make me think otherwise. You don’t expect it, but you are never surprised.”

Winning that second game was crucial to reset, then Sunday they played their best baseball in a long time.

“Even though we were winning, it felt like we were in a dogfight and kind of stalemates,” Sabins said of the recent stretch of ball. “It was kind of grindy, but today felt like it was the way we played earlier in the conference season.”

On Saturday, Reese Bassinger came out of the bullpen due to an early injury to the starting pitcher and hurled seven innings of relief to pick up his sixth win of the season.

“A win’s a win. We’re 43 pretty gritty dudes. Every game in the win column is good. Right here, where it says 39, it doesn’t say how we won, it just says we won. I could give up six line drives in a row and if they’re outs, they’re outs. My junior college coach always said ‘No matter how you win, a win is a win.’ There’s always things we need to work on after a win. Baseball’s hard enough as it is. There’s no need to critique the wins.”

Cooking up a solution

There’s always things to work out and it isn’t always things that you practice.

On Saturday, Sabins decided that he would stick with Bassinger as long as he could and that meant Chase Meyer didn’t get to relieve. Then come Sunday, they got a shutout out of Jack Kartsonas and Carlton Estridge, again bypassing Meyer, an edgy type player who eagerly awaits each relief assignment and has been crucial in what WVU has done.

“We haven’t been in this spot with Meyer a ton,” Sabins said. “He’s so valuable to the team and has won so many games as one of the big horses out of the bullpen, so I even talked to him after the game. I told him I knew he wanted to be in the game and I wanted to put him in, but circumstantially it didn’t make sense, so I have to have that guy over to the house for a steak dinner to get him going.”

Yes, a coach sometimes has to play cook and host, too.

He’ll find a way to get him in to pitch an inning against Pittsburgh and be quick to play him over the weekend in Big 12 play against Kansas State in the next-to-last conference series of the season.

Dealing with failure

Circumstances have caused Sabins to do some juggling of his personnel. Freshman Gavin Kelly from the Pittsburgh area is listed on the roster as a catcher and plays some outfield, but when second baseman Sam White injured his shoulder and couldn’t play defensively, Sabins moved Kelly into that role about a month ago.

It’s hardly his prime position but he has done acceptable work but had a tough time in Saturday’s loss and needed someone to let him know that he was appreciated.

That someone was Sabins.

“He did well,” Sabins explained after Saturday’s second game. “There have been some ups and downs. Occasionally, for a freshman, you eat a sandwich. He hasn’t done that much, but he said he has switched his mentality from playing defense on defense to playing offense on defense.

“He started thinking, ‘Hit me the ball. I want to make this play.’ I said to him, ‘Why do you think you stayed in the game after the mess you made of defense in that game?’ He said he didn’t know why. I told him, ‘You are the best option. Even when you are in a bad spot, you are still a superstar. If you don’t figure it out now, you need to figure it out tomorrow. If you don’t figure it out tomorrow, you need to figure it out the next day.

“I can either leave you in there and you can figure it out or I can just take a superstar out of the lineup and things get worse, so it doesn’t make any sense. Even though you think you had the worst day defensively of your career, you turned two double plays and ended up winning the game.

“There’s nobody who turns the double play better, no one who has a better arm and can do that, so even on his worst day he helps us win an important game.”