No matter how successful Western’s baseball program has been in recent years, Head Coach Chris Finwood is just happy people know where to find the team.

“When I got here, I used to joke all the time, ‘I don’t think anybody in Bowling Green knows where our field is,’ and now they do,” he said. “Our marketing staff is doing a great job of helping us promote, the ballpark’s conducive to enjoying a ball game and we’ve put a good product on the field.”

But with all due respect to the marketing staff and Denes Field, the Toppers’ on-field success has been the real story of the past four seasons.

The program has improved exponentially since Finwood’s first season in 2006, when Western finished 22-30 and 5-18 in the Sun Belt Conference.

The next season, they set a conference record for improvement in consecutive seasons with a 15-15 record in the Sun Belt. In 2008, the Toppers won the conference tournament and advanced to the NCAA tournament for the third time in school history.

And last season, they compiled the program’s first 40-win season in 21 years, took the Sun Belt Conference regular-season title and received Western’s first at-large NCAA tournament bid. The Toppers ended the season ranked No. 23 in the Collegiate Baseball Top 30 poll, their first national ranking since 2001, and had a record six players taken in the Major League Baseball draft.

But despite all that, the 2010 season could be the real indicator of just how far the program has come in Finwood’s tenure.

The Toppers lost seven offensive players from last season’s squad, either due to the draft or exhausted eligibility. Those players accounted for at least half of Western’s offense last season, contributing 54 percent of the team’s runs, 51 percent of the hits, 50 percent of the runs batted in and a whopping 73 percent of the home runs.

The Toppers will play their first organized games without that production this weekend by competing in their annual Fall World Series, three intrasquad scrimmages Nov. 5 through 7 that conclude the fall practice season.

The 2010 squad will be expected to maintain the success the Toppers achieved in the past two seasons without the overwhelming offense that became a staple behind players like departed all-Americans Chad Cregar and Wade Gaynor.

“This year’s team will be interesting because we did lose a lot of experience on the field, but we also have a lot of kids back that did play last year,” Finwood said. “We’ll be a little bit different ball club. We’ve got more team speed. We’re not going to hit as many home runs, so we’ll be probably more the way I usually like to play anyway, trying to run and put pressure on pitchers. The home runs will come when they come.”