Nick Mingione shares what he wants cleaned up before Kentucky's next game

Kentucky Proud Park will finally see some postseason baseball with Kentucky making the NCAA Tournament and hosting a regional for the first time since 2017. Even so, that doesn’t mean that the Wildcats have played the cleanest down the stretch of the season.

In order to get back to their best, Nick Mingione preached aggression in his press conference on Monday following the field selection. He knows his team will put in a great effort to get some things corrected but, in the end, he says it’s going to come down to whether or not they get back to putting pressure on whoever they face.

“There’s been times where, you know, on the pitching staff that we haven’t gone on the attack enough and maybe not thrown as many strikes. There’s been times where we’ve hit too many routine fly balls,” said Mingione. “This team? It’s really interesting. Like, you ask them, ‘Hey, we need to do this’. And they make a conscious effort to fix it like that.”

“We’re at our best when we’re attacking on the mound. (When) we’re hitting line drives (and) ground balls, creating all kinds of pressure for our opponents. We’re stealing bases, we’re bunting. That’s us at our best,” Mingione said. “When we’re not at our best? We’re tentative, we hit routine fly balls, we’re nibbling around the strike zone. We’re at our best when we’re attacking.”

Kentucky enters the NCAA Tournament with a record of 36-18. Even so, their pace obviously slowed down during the conference portion of their season as UK went 16-14 in SEC play. That included just one conference series win in their last seven to end the regular season and a 5-13 record combined in the last six SEC series that they lost.

That’s not the team that Mingione can take into the postseason considering what already happened in the SEC Tournament. It’s also not considering the teams in the field at the Lexington Regional. However, that’s not the team that Mingione expects to show up. In his opinion, he believes Kentucky will be at its best for the first pitch against Ball State on Friday.

Kentucky baseball has favorable odds to make the College World Series

For the first time since 2017, Kentucky baseball is hosting a regional in Lexington. Even better, the ‘Bat Cats, which picked up the No. 12 national seed, have a favorable path to making its first-ever College World Series.

According to @statsowar on Twitter, Nick Mingione’s squad has a 30.0 percent chance of making the CWS. That’s the sixth-best odds from the 64-team field. That percentage is based on 10,000 simulations of the 2023 NCAA Tournament. The same account also gives Kentucky a 58.1 percent chance to make it out of the Lexington Regional. That region consists of West Virginia (2), Indiana (3), and Ball State (4).

Wake Forest (44.7%), Vanderbilt (35.6%), Florida (35.1%), LSU (32.3%), and Virginia (30.4%) are the only teams with a higher percent chance than Kentucky of making the College World Series.