The 2025 Tulane University Green Wave baseball team has come out of the gate swinging, with the two-time defending conference champions off to their best start in the past three seasons. Their 7-1 record in the first eight games surpasses both their 2024 and 2023 conference champion seasons, where they started 4-4 and 1-7, respectively.
Granted, both seasons saw them playing tougher competition, with series against the strong University of California, Irvine, as well as the 2023 season being Jay Uhlman’s first as the team’s head coach, but the 2025 Green Wave have proven that they are a serious threat to three-peat.
Central to the team’s success has been their depth at hitting so far. Looking at the team’s on-base plus slugging statistic, which combines a player’s on base percentage with their slugging percentage — how many bases a batter averages per at bat — and the Green Wave currently has seven batters hitting over the 1.000 mark. To put in context how great that is, this past MLB season, the league average was a .734 OPS, with only a small handful of players finishing the season with a 1.000 mark, such as Shohei Ohtani, Corey Seager and Ronald Acuna Jr.
Of course, Tulane has only played eight games, and players will regress to the mean as the season goes on and competition gets more challenging. But with six of those seven players already having over 10 at-bats this season, it goes to show that Tulane has some real threats in their dugout. Two of those seven, Matthias Haas and Connor Rassmussen, both returners from last season, already have over 10 runs batted in, while Gavin Schultz joins them as the three players with at least nine hits.
Tulane’s last two games, a 10-0 win to clinch the series against Loyola Marymount University and a 13-3 win against Nicholls State University, showcased the strength of their bullpen as well. In the LMU game, senior Trey Cehaljic earned his second win of the year, striking out seven batters in five innings pitched. Redshirt junior Blaise Wilcenski, credited for the Nicholls win, has also had a strong start to the season with a 3-0 pitching record. Wilcenski has struck out five batters with just over six total innings pitched.
The Green Wave will spend their Mardi Gras weekend traveling to Malibu, California — not quite New Orleans during Mardi Gras, but I wouldn’t be complaining — to play a series against Pepperdine University. Tulane looks to take care of business on the road while hopefully enjoying the ocean view from Pepperdine.
