The expectations game is as central to college baseball as it is the rest of life. You can restrain your enthusiasm for a new favorite restaurant to your friends, because effusive praise will only raise the culinary bar for them. Presidential candidates tell the press they hope to come in third place days before a primary, knowing that coming in second (as they expect to do) will then be heralded as an unexpected victory.
So it is with Stanford Baseball. After a disastrous 2015 campaign, many expect the Cardinal to reside in the bottom half of the Pac-12 when all is said and done.