Grant Hussey's record headline news

It’s something West Virginia first baseman Grant Hussey has done more than any other player in the school’s history, earning him the headlines as he tied and then broke Jedd Gyorko’s and Tim McCabe’s school record of 35 career home runs in a dominating 11-1 victory over Pitt at the Pirates’ PNC Park on Tuesday night.

It was Coach Randy Mazey who put the best perspective on the accomplishment after the game.

“Look how many players have played at West Virginia in the last 100 years that were really, really good players who don’t have that record. Then, here comes Grant from our state. Our crowd seems like they gravitate toward West Virginia kids, because we don’t get that many of them and when an in-state kid does something like that it makes them proud of him, proud of the whole program.”

But while the headlines Monday morning told you what Hussey did, sometimes you have to read the stories and maybe in between the lines to find out who Grant Hussey is and who the little things sometimes count more.

There was a wonderful tipoff on the kind of person and teammate Hussey, the top high school baseball player in the state when he was being recruited out of Parkersburg a few years back, really is.

Let’s begin with the pressure that there had to be on him. It’s legend about how the pressure on Roger Maris grew as he chased Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs in a season, losing both sleep and hair in the process. And Henry Aaron’s chase of Ruth’s career record of 714 is also well documented for the torment he went through.

Now Jedd Gyorko and Tim McCabe are not to be confused with Babe Ruth, but Hussey admitted he thought about the record for quite a while.

“I looked at (the record) at the start of the season,” Hussey said. “It was always a goal of mine. I remember looking at it my sophomore year seeing if I was close.”

And while he maintains he handled things pretty well as he approached the record, saying “I wasn’t stressing out or anything), hitting just one home run in the 10 previous games certainly got him to thinking.

His father, Steve Hussey, who has lived and died through every moment with Grant as a fan who had rooted for the Mountaineers since he was 5 years old, said Grant probably was feeling it more than he would let on.

There is a bit of a sidebar to Steve Hussey’s emotions at the moment of the home run.

He had planned to drive to Pittsburgh for the game and an old friend had stopped to see him. After they reminisced with the friend he asked him if he wanted to go to the game with him. They drove up and ...

Well, let’s let Steve Hussey pick it up from there.

“I was running a little late and it was funny, soon as I got to the top of the steps on the concourse, he was batting. The first pitch I saw was the ball he hit out to left field,” he said.

That was the record-tying home run.

“Just being around Grant and watching him play over the years, when he hits first at-bat home runs, he’ll hit another,” he said.

And so he did, crushing a laser of a home run six rows above the 21-foot high Clemente Wall in right field for the record-setting home run.

But about reading between the lines, the real story of who Grant Hussey is was found between the two home runs.

He came to the plate after the record tying homer, certainly still floating on air. As his father said, he had a history of hitting a second home run after hitting a first on his first at bat. He had to be juiced but do you know what he did?

Facing a shift in which the third baseman was playing in the normal shortstop spot, Grant Hussey laid down a perfect bunt for a base hit.

“I loved it,” his father said. “You expect him to hit home runs; you don’t expect him to do that.”

But this is a kid thinking team, not of himself, first. WVU needed a baserunner and the Pitt defense was giving them just that.

“In the context of what was going on, I thought that was really neat,” Steve Hussey said. “The batter before him had gotten out, so he was just trying to get on base and then Benjamin Lumsden hit a home run right after that.

“He’s not a selfish player. I’m Dad and I’m biased, but he’ll do whatever the coaches ask him and whatever the team needs to win.”

Of course, on his third at bat, he set the record.

It was there that he jumped completely out of character.

“I think that’s the most excited I’ve ever seen him,” Steve Hussey said. “He was hopping and jumping and skipping as he went around the bases with a big smile on his face. He’s not that emotive normally. He usually hits a home run, trots around the bases, does a half-hearted stomp on home plate, goes in the dugout and gets his glove.”

But this was special.

“I felt like a little kid out there today,” Hussey admitted. “That was probably the most emotion I’ve ever had running around the bases, and I’m not too much of an emotional person.”

But now it’s time to bear down for the stretch drive. WVU is in position to win a Big 12 championship and the stated team goal is to get to Omaha and the College World Series for the first time in Randy Mazey’s final season running the team.

And they can make that run now without Hussey having to worry about chasing a record.