The final four

They are all that is left. \nTwo large recruiting classes from different eras in IU baseball yielded these four young men. Seated in a semi-circle on brown leather couches in the IU baseball locker room, rubbing sleep from their eyes on an early morning during finals week, were the only four seniors on a youth-laden IU squad. \nThere they sat, pitchers Chris McCombs and Doug Fleenor and middle infielders Tyler Cox and David Trager, clawing back into their memories and reflecting on nearly four full years of college baseball. \nThe first question is predictable: What will you remember most about your time as a Hoosier? The first answer – change. \n“There’s been a lot of changes while we’ve been here,” Fleenor said. “All four of us started here with a different coach, and we’ve been through the changes with a new coach, with a \nnew system.”\nAll four came to Bloomington to play for Bob Morgan, a coach who retired three years ago with over 1,000 career wins. The coaching switch caused plenty of program turnover and roster upheaval, leaving just four seniors and five juniors on a 38-man roster for the 2008 campaign.\nIt wasn’t always that way. McCombs, Cox and Trager came to IU with 17 other new Hoosiers, many of them freshmen with a few transfers and older first-year players scattered amongst them. Now they’re all that’s left, though maybe not by pure chance. “Our sophomore year, it was the three of us that lived together, and it just kind of worked out that the three of us were the ones that stuck around,” McCombs said, pointing to Cox and Trager as well as himself. “Doug’s a year older than we are – he’s an old man.”\nFleenor is an old man, at least in college terms. The Richmond, Ind., native came in a year earlier than the other three players in the room, but sat out the 2005 campaign after elbow surgery. \nFleenor’s been pitching at Sembower Field long enough to remember Gerry DiNardo’s time as head football coach. The former point guard for the Richmond High School basketball team said he’s glad he made it from there to here. \n“My class had 16 or 17 guys in it, there were only three of us last year – from that whole class,” Fleenor said. “Guys go different ways sometimes. It makes you feel a little bit proud of what you’ve done, still being here in your last year.”\nThat experience has its price. Baseball isn’t always easy on the body, a lesson Trager said he’s learned as his career winds down. \n“I remember after freshman year,” he said, “I’d get done with practice or get done with a weekend, I’d go to sleep that night and wake up. Now it’s like, three days later, I’m still feeling it. I can’t get up.”\nAnd the strain is not just physical for the “old man” Fleenor.\n“There are some people on that team that were in middle school when I was in college,” he said of the Hoosiers, drawing laughs from the other three. \nPerhaps it isn’t so bad to be “top of the chain,” as Trager put it. With small senior classes last year and this year, this group has been thrust into a two-year leadership role with so much inexperience on the squad. It’s not a bad thing though, the way Cox sees it.\n“(The freshmen) all have high hopes and big expectations, and then you get to see them go through the same struggles you went through personally,” said Cox, whose family history in baseball lies two hours north of here at in-state rival Purdue (his grandfather’s brothers played there). “It makes it even better when you can mentor them and get them over that hump a little bit faster than you did.”\nThe fundamental downside to being a senior, it would seem, is that once you’re done, you’re done.\nSo what awaits this senior class as they head into the world? Cox wants to get into sports performance and strength training. McCombs wants to work in college sports. Fleenor just wants to “play in the fiercest intramural basketball league I can find.” Trager isn’t sure just yet. \n“I’d like to take this next year after baseball to do different things, kind of find what I’m really interested in, whatever fits me and my personality, and kind of go from there,” Trager said. “But, you know, wherever that takes me.”\nThere will be life after baseball, as hard as it might be to imagine. None of the four harbor much professional aspiration, though Cox said he’d give it a try if the majors came calling in the June draft or beyond. McCombs – who’s endured two Tommy John procedures already and called going pro a “game-time decision” – said he’s interested “to see what it’s like outside of baseball.”\n“It’s just weird to think about this, I’ve been doing it my whole life,” McCombs said, to which Trager added: “There’s always softball.”\nPerhaps there will be time for slow-pitch, but the season isn’t quite over yet. Both Fleenor and McCombs said the on-the-field memories that will stick with them most are the Hoosiers’ victory over LSU and series split with Michigan just last weekend, respectively. But the one thing McCombs – and every other player on the team – wants out of this season is something they have never experienced.\n“I’d like to play in the Big Ten Tournament,” McCombs said.\nThe Hoosiers have 12 more conference games to dig their way out of last place and into the program’s first conference tournament in five years. Until then, they’re just going to enjoy the end of classes and concentrate on reaching their goal. \nBut the four know it will be the last time baseball will be their only care, something that perhaps makes these final weeks a little sweeter. \n“That’s just the most fun time for us,” Trager said, speaking about the time between the end of finals and the end of the season. “We don’t have anything to worry about except for baseball. It’s a really fun experience, just to have baseball and that’s it.”