OMAHA, Neb.—When Chip Hale looked at the team he and his staff assembled last fall he felt it was one that could get Arizona back to the College World Series. The belief was so strong that T-shirts were made and a banner hung in the clubhouse about the Wildcats’ ‘Chasing Five,’ meaning the school’s fifth national championship.
The UA has gotten to Omaha, as it thought it could, but the journey was far from seamless.
“There was a point in the season—I think everybody, if we’re honest—where it did look very good for us,” Hale said Sunday, after clinching a World Series bid by beating North Carolina in the Super Regionals. “But these kids sucked it up. We hit some real roadblocks along the way, and it ended up being a blessing to us, because we got hot at the right time.”
Arizona (44-19) opens its 19th appearance in the CWS at 11 a.m. PT Friday at Charles Schwab Field Omaha against Coastal Carolina, the team it fell to in three games in the 2016 championship series. The 13th-seeded Chanticleers come in on a 23-game win streak and won both their regional and Super Regional with little resistance.
The Wildcats have won 10 of 11, but before that was a skid of five losses in six games—two at home to Big 12 doormat Utah—that made the likelihood of reaching the CWS less realistic than in March when they were 18-5 and had just taken a road series over eventual conference regular season champion West Virginia.
“We had that little lull in the Utah series and the beginning of the Houston series, and I think that was really like a gut check and a reality check,” junior closer Tony Pluta said. “We just all got right back on track, and that kind of just pushed us to where we are now.”
Arizona won eight in a row after that, sweeping through the Big 12 tourney and the Eugene Regional, before getting crushed 18-2 at North Carolina in the Super Regional opener. Yet less than 24 hours later the Wildcats stayed alive by winning a back-and-forth shootout before rallying late again in Game 3.
“We grind out every pitch,” junior shortstop Mason White said. “It’s been a long season. There’s been a lot of long stretches of good and bad, but this team really adopts that pitch by pitch mentality that’s been pretty much shoved in our face all year from the coaching staff, because they know that’s how you win baseball games. And guys who didn’t really buy into that, they bought into it now, and that’s why we’ve gotten ourselves to this point.”
Sophomore right-hander Owen Kramkowski (9-6, 5.48) will start for Arizona against Coastal Carolina righty Riley Eikhoff (6-2, 2.90). Kramkowski lasted only 1.1 innings in the Super Regional opener, allowing eight runs, but prior to that he had yielded one run over 13 innings in starts at the Big 12 tourney and Eugene Regional, winning both.
“We need good pitching every night to stay in the game and stay close,” Hale said. “This ballpark, pitching is going to play big in this thing.”
Charles Schwab Field Omaha is not as big as Hi Corbett Field—no college park is, really—but it is larger than what most other teams in the CWS field are used to. And it plays similar to Hi C because of the tendency for the wind to blow in.
“It feels very familiar,” White said Thursday after practicing inside The Schwab. “You can’t hit the ball up in the air. You can’t hit lazy fly balls, exactly like Chip yells at us all the time. Hit the ball out of the air. He screams low and hard. And that’s how we played at home.
“Aaron Walton would hit a ball 110 miles an hour in the gap and it would get caught, and then someone would hit a hard ground ball and get a guy over, maybe for a hit and score a run, and he’d be screaming, see, that’s all you got to do. So I think that’s going to play for us being here, and hopefully we feel more at home with that.”
Win or lose, Arizona will play again Sunday against either No. 8 seed Oregon State or Louisville. The Wildcats went 0-2 in Omaha in 2021, the first time they failed to win a game at the CWS since 1985 when Hale was a sophomore.
The UA is 45-32 all-time in the series, 9-9 in the opening games. It started 0-1 in both 1976 and 1980 before coming out of the loser’s bracket to win the first two national titles.