DENVER – It's time for the baseball showdown series between MSU Denver and Colorado Mesa and everyone knows what that means.
 
Wait, both teams are unranked and are at .500 for the season?
 
"They've played some good teams," MSU Denver coach Ryan Strain said. "They're a different team than what they've been – similar to us in that neither one of us is hitting the amount of home runs we're used to hitting. I don't know if that's ballpark, pitching … it's hard to tell.
 
"But they still have good players. A couple of freshmen are their leading hitters. They lost some firepower, like we did, but they're still very good."
 
Colorado Mesa (7-7) comes to the Assembly Athletic Complex to face MSU Denver (9-9) for a four-game series that includes a 1 p.m. game Saturday, a noon doubleheader on Sunday and a noon single game on Monday.
 
It's the opening weekend of Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference play, and for the second consecutive season the preseason picks to finish first and second are squaring off to start things off.
 
While the Mavericks and Roadrunners have usually run away and hid from the rest of the league the past few seasons, this season has a bit of a different feel. CSU Pueblo is 11-5 in non-conference play, but Regis (8-7-1), Colorado School of Mines (7-7), Mesa and MSU Denver are tightly packed.
 
It's somewhat similar in the South Central Region's other league – the Lone Star Conference – where only four teams are more than two games over .500 and seven more are between two over and two under.
 
Only six teams from the region advance to the NCAA Tournament.
 
"We're still in the mix," Strain said. "Other than a couple of teams, everybody in the region is .500 or a couple of games over. It's going come down to how we all play in league play. What will help us, hopefully, is that the teams we've played should all be over .500. Our strength of schedule should be stronger than last year."
 
While Colorado Mesa is 7-7 on paper, no one is expecting a mere .500 team to roll into Denver this weekend.
 
"It's always good competition," Strain said. "It's always fun to play them. They've been the standard for so long in this league."
 
MSU Denver is hoping for strong efforts from starting pitchers Jack Slominski, Reichle Arcilise, Brad Helton and Dylan Webber while its offense finds consistency.
 
"It's going to come down to how hard each team competes at the plate, but most importantly who pitches the best," Strain said. "I feel good about our four starters. They've all done some really good things, and they've all had a game – or an inning or two – where they haven't been good. Hopefully they can pitch well and keep us in games."