OMAHA, Neb.—On May 14, Arizona flew from Tucson to Houston for a 3-game series against the Cougars to wrap up the regular season. It was their fourth trip to Texas in three months, including a pair of tournaments and a Big 12 Conference series at Texas Tech.
It was also the start of what’s been almost an entire month on the road, save for some brief return trips home. The College World Series, which begins Friday, marks the fifth consecutive weekend the Wildcats will play on the road.
“We we have a team motto: we call it the Wear Down,” Mason White said Thursday. “We’re used to going on these long trips, connecting flights, long bus rides. We started this 4-week trip, I guess you’d call it, in Houston. It was hot and super humid. We’ve just been grinding through that and it prepared us very well for this.”
Arizona (44-19) lost that first game at Houston, part of a rut of five losses in six games, then took the last two to lock up a bye in the Big 12 Tournament. The team then bussed to Arlington, ultimately spending 10 days in Texas after winning the conference tourney title at Globe Life Field before flying back to Tucson.
Three days later, after learning they were headed to Oregon for the Eugene Regional, the Wildcats were on another flight. They got to come home again after sweeping that regional before leaving for Chapel Hill, N.C., for the Super Regionals, but after taking that in three games they stayed in North Carolina until flying to Omaha on Tuesday.
“Everybody’s on the road here,” Tony Pluta said. “So I think being on the road was a really big help for us just to have a little bit of a hostile environment in some places, and I think that really prepared us for what we’re going to face here.”
To sum it up, in the past 30 days the UA has played 12 games in four cities, winning 11, while spending five nights in their own beds. With the College World Series lasting up to 11 days, they’re hoping not to have their heads hit those familiar pillows for a little while longer.
Hale’s Homecoming
The only players on Arizona’s roster to play in Omaha are a trio of seniors—second baseman Garen Caulfield, first baseman Tommy Splaine and reliever Eric Orloff. They were part of the 2022 squad that won a pair of nonconference games at Creighton.
Hale has experienced the College World Series to the fullest, as a player with the UA in 1985-86. The Wildcats went 0-2 his first visit and won it all in 1986.
“A lot has changed since then,” Hale joked.
Those World Series were held at the old Rosenblatt Stadium, which was replaced in 2012 by a bigger, more modern facility. Before it went away, though, Hale got to make a few trips to play there when he was manager of the Triple-A Tucson Sidewinders in the mid-2000s.
“It was a gray, old stadium,” Hale said of Rosenblatt. “What Omaha has done for this, it’s amazing just to see the differences. In the 80s, it was more of like a mom and pop store, and now it’s just become this huge, unbelievable industry.”
West Coast, represent!
Much has been made of the uniqueness of the 2025 CWS field, with none of the eight qualifiers playing in last year’s series—the first time that’s happened since the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1999—and how six different conferences are represented. It’s a far cry from 2024 when the ACC and SEC each had four in Omaha, leaving many to wonder if those power leagues had fully taken over the sport.
This time they have a combined three entrants, Arkansas and LSU for the SEC and Louisville (which finished in 10th place in the regular season for the ACC). That’s the same number as the old Pac-12 unofficially has here, thanks to the presence of Arizona, Oregon State and UCLA.
The last time the Pac-10/12 got three teams to Omaha was in 1988, while it last had multiple participants in 2021 with Arizona and Stanford.
Hale said he’s heard all the rumblings about the ACC/SEC supremacy, he also thinks it’s not worth complaining about.
“The only way we’re going to change this is to get back to Omaha,” he said. “For us, for everybody on the West Coast, if we want to change this, if it’s going to change.”