The Binghamton fall sports teams are in full swing, but the baseball team is also taking some full swings of its own. Despite being out of season, BU baseball and the other spring sports are putting in hard work now so they can be at their best come spring.

“The fall is absolutely paramount to team progress,” said baseball assistant coach Ryan Hurba.

Over the five weeks since the fall semester kicked off, the baseball team has been taking the field almost daily, working on its fundamentals. During the fall season, new players come in, meet their teammates and show what they can do, while returning players display the progress they have made over the summer months.

For junior Ryan James, who played in a little over half of the team’s games last season, the fall provides an opportunity to get a head start on the competition.

“You come in here with your natural skills, and the thing is that you’re sitting here in fall ball and trying to improve every thing that you’ve ever known before,” James said. “You’re trying to hit every ball hard because you’re competing for a spot in the spring.”

From an evaluative standpoint, the fall also allows the coaches to see the talent they have for next spring, and what can be worked in the winter months of the offseason that has just started (the team’s final fall practice was last Saturday).

Offseason, however, is really a misnomer.

There is a common saying in sports that “players are made in the offseason.” In the winter, when it’s far too cold out and the field is in too poor a shape for baseball, the ballplayers head to the weight room and the batting cages for workouts and individual improvement.

“For me, I know one thing that I do is that I pull my head off, and so for me, I would work on going through dry mechanicals to just try to prevent that,” said junior pitcher Scott Diamond, one of the team’s aces.

Dry exercises involve pitchers going through their motions, but without a ball. Pitchers and hitters both do many drills during the winter, a time when the pressure of game situations are out of the players’ minds.

“This is a very non-result-oriented time; from a statistical standpoint, we’re looking for different types of results,” Hurba said. “A little adjustment here, a little adjustment there, it’s a very nonintimidating environment. All we’re doing here is identifying problems … we’re figuring out what we can fix and what we can hide from the opposition.”

The players and coaches put in all the hard work now and in the coming months so they can be in peak shape when the snow melts and the season starts in the spring.

Rogers Hornsby, the Hall of Fame second baseman, once said, “People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”

At least when it comes to the Binghamton baseball team, Hornsby couldn’t have been farther from the truth.