The Michigan State Spartans baseball team is the varsity intercollegiate baseball team of Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, United States. The team competes in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I and are members of the Big Ten Conference.
Beginning play in 1884, the Spartans have made the NCAA Division I Baseball Championship 5 times, advancing to the College World Series once, in 1954, with a third-place finish. The team has won 4 Big Ten conference championships and 5 Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association titles. The team played in the MIAA until 1907 and played as an independent until the university joined the Big Ten in 1949 and the Spartan baseball team began Big Ten play in 1951.
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Spartan baseball Hall of Famer
Robin Roberts initially came to East Lansing as part of a United States Army Air Corps training program in 1944. After the war ended in 1945, he took his leave of the service and returned to MSC (the name was Michigan State College at the time) to play basketball. Roberts was twice named captain, earning three varsity letters in basketball. After his second season playing basketball, Roberts tried out for the Michigan State baseball team, becoming a pitcher because it was the position that coach John Kobs needed most. After playing for Michigan State, going 9–6 over two seasons, with 6 shutouts in the 1946 season, he was signed by the Philadelphia Phillies in 1948. Roberts would go on to win 286 games, with 7 Major League Baseball All-Star Game appearances in a 19-year Major League Baseball career. Roberts was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1976.
In 1992, Roberts was one of 30 members of the charter class of former Michigan State Spartans athletes, coaches, and administrators inducted into the MSU Athletics Hall of Fame. His number 36 is retired, one of only five Spartan baseball players to receive the honor.
Other notable Spartans
Ed Pinnance made history for Michigan State baseball as the first Spartan (the school was called State Agricultural College at the time with the nickname Aggies) to advance to the major leagues, appearing in 1903 for the Philadelphia Athletics, and was also among the first full-blooded Native Americans to play in MLB. Tom Yewcic was named the College World Series Most Outstanding Player of the 1954 College World Series despite his team not reaching the championship game and would have a brief professional career with the Detroit Tigers. Yewcic was a two-sport star at Michigan State, leading the 1953 football team to a Rose Bowl win. Earl Morrall was a teammates of Yewcic on the 1954 College World Series team, led the 1955 football team to a Rose Bowl victory, and chose a career in the National Football League where he won 4 Super Bowls and an NFL MVP trophy in a 21-year career. Dick Radatz earned first-time All Big Ten honors in 1959, going 10–1, 1.12 ERA, and was a two-time MLB All-Star with the Boston Red Sox in 7-year pro career. A teammate of Radatz, Ron Perranoski would leave a stellar collegiate career in East Lansing for an MLB career, twice leading the league in saves, and twice helping his team win the World Series in his 13-year stint in the majors.
The Major League Baseball draft began in 1965 and the Spartans would be represented in the first year when Dick Billings was drafted in the 25th round by the Washington Senators as the first Michigan State player ever drafted. Billings would go on to an 8-year MLB career. Steve Garvey was a two-sport athlete at Michigan State, earning a letter as a defensive back for the football team, and would earn All Big Ten and All American honors in 1968 on his way to the majors where he would earn a World Series ring with the Los Angeles Dodgers as a 10-time MLB All-Star. Rick Miller was a Sporting News First Team All-American in 1969 for Michigan State and then won a Gold Glove for the California Angels in 1978 in his 15-year MLB career as a defensive standout.
In 1974, Spartan coach Danny Litwhiler pioneered the use of radar to measure pitching velocity. Litwiler said, “One day in 1974 while I was the coach at Michigan State, I read an article in the student paper that said ‘Don’t Speed on Campus’ and there was a photo of an MSU policeman who had just received a new radar gun. That got me thinking—could we use it to check the velocity of the baseball? So I found out that the cops’ radar guns were powered by the cigarette lighters in their police cars. So, we got an MSU police car to drive out on the field to time the pitches and the readouts were accurate within one mph each time. Within one week, I had the prototype of the JUGS gun in my hands and today that same prototype is in the Hall of Fame." Litwhiler also invented 'Diamond Grit' to help dry out fields after rain.