For the first time this season, the Baylor baseball team will play a game outside of Waco today.

Yet the team isn’t exactly jittery or nervous about venturing to a foreign ballpark. They’ve already experienced the ultimate road trip, thanks to a humanitarian journey they made to Cuba a couple of weeks before the season began.

“Honestly, even though this is the first time we’ve played on the road, we’ve been on the road. We went to Cuba,” said BU coach Steve Smith, whose team opens Big 12 play at No. 25 Oklahoma this weekend. “So I think the logistics of traveling and being away from here, I don’t think that’s going to be an issue.”

Nevertheless, the Bears (11-6) will have to grow accustomed to a new ballpark after playing their first 17 games at Baylor Ballpark. And it would have been 18, if a game against TCU hadn’t been snowed out.

“For these freshmen, it’ll probably be a little different,” junior pitcher Craig Fritsch said. “It’s the first Big 12 road game, and it’ll be a little different for them, but I think they’ll adjust well. Our older guys are used to it by now, and it shouldn’t be too bad.”

In the Sooners (17-2), Baylor opens conference play against a stout-hitting club that led the league in runs, home runs and RBIs a year ago. However, OU lost a handful of its top hitters through attrition, and Smith said the Sooners also took a step back from an equipment standpoint.

“They lost quite a bit, and plus they lost their bats,” Smith said. “The NCAA has put a moratorium on graphite bats, and so there’s a bunch of teams out there that are swinging the same thing the rest of us are swinging. . . . They’ll have pretty good balance in their lineup between guys who can swing the bat with some pop and guys who can run. That’s their style of play — they’re aggressive offensively.”

Baylor will try to silence OU’s aluminum sticks with a starting pitching staff that has made major strides over the past year. BU’s starting rotation has combined for a 3.13 ERA and 117 strikeouts in 122 innings in weekend games, while the bullpen has been mostly lights out, posting a 7-0 record with a 2.69 ERA.

“Baseball is a day-by-day game, and it largely revolves around how well you pitch,” Smith said.

“The difference in the pitching this year?” Fritsch said. “I couldn’t really tell you. We’re just working a lot harder. We’re hitting spots and getting it done.”

After dropping five in a row at the start of March, the Bears have punched out five straight victories and are one win away from the program’s longest winning streak since 2003.

Can the Bears keep it up? Sure, they say, as long as they keep doing what they’ve been doing — playing good baseball.

BU senior infielder Raynor Campbell said that’s what he’ll stress to his younger teammates, to remind them that they needn’t worry about the hostile crowd or the unfamiliar ballpark or the dawning of conference play.

“It’s not any different,” Campbell said. “The game of baseball, that’s what is nice about it. It’s just playing the game, not the opponent. If you can play the game, you’re going to win games. So I’m just going to tell them, ‘Relax, play the game like you’ve always played it. The bases are the same distance away, and if you hit the ball hard, you’re still going to get a hit.’ ”

bcherry@wacotrib.com

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