Photo: Bobby Kraus/WCSN
The 2019 baseball season is officially underway and it could not have gotten off to a better start for the Sun Devils. Tracy Smith and his squad showed no mercy on Friday night, beating the Notre Dame Fighting Irish 10-1. The win was the Devils’ largest margin of victory over a Power 5 opponent on opening day in program history.
From the outside looking in, Friday night was an opportunity to show change. After back-to back-seasons with a 23-32 record, the Sun Devils’ home opener was a small and, in the grand scheme of things, non-indicative opportunity for the team to prove that 2019 would be different. Different in the cleanliness of play, different in the effectiveness of the pitching and certainly different in the final scores.
While Friday night’s season opener was the first of a 56-game season, the team checked all those boxes.
“We were about as focused as we’ve been,” Smith said of his team. “They want to play well. I’d be lying if I said a strong start wasn’t good. This was a step in the right direction.”
By the sheer volume of success from the team’s first game, “step in the right direction” may underplay just how great the team was.
With the bats, the Devils scored 10 runs on eight hits and walked eight times. Spencer Torkelson increased his on-base streak to 40 games, a streak that dates back to March 13, 2018. Torkelson also hit a three-run double in the second inning of the game, a hit that set the tone for ASU’s offense through the final pitch of the game.
“It felt good,” Torkelson said. “The pitcher’s tendencies were fastballs away and I knew his offspeed wasn’t good enough to beat me. I was sitting on a fastball away and I did some damage to it.”
The damage did not stop there.
Sam Ferri, who played for the first time since undergoing Tommy John surgery last year, had three runs batted in of his own and helped the pitching staff get past a good, young team in the Fighting Irish.
“It felt good,” Ferri said on coming back. “It was definitely a big burden to get off my chest.”
But, Friday night’s story was surprisingly not on the offensive side. It was starting pitcher Alec Marsh.
Marsh, a junior right-handed pitcher, is currently ranked 157th overall in d1baseball.com’s National Top 350 College Prospects for the upcoming 2019 MLB draft. In his season debut, he looked like he deserved to be higher.
Marsh toed the rubber, wound up and threw a strike to open his season, and wound up throwing 62 of his 88 pitches for strikes. Marsh’s command was something Smith said “…impressed me and that’s why he earned this spot.”
Marsh went 6.2 innings and set a new career high in strikeouts with ten. It was the highest opening day strikeout total for the Devils in the last two decades.
“I did that, I didn’t even know I did that,” Marsh said on his new career-high. “Well, that’s really cool. But, seriously, that means a lot to me. ”
For the Fighting Irish, there was very little to fight for.
Starting pitcher Tommy Sheehan lasted just 2.2 innings in which he surrendered five runs, one of them earned. In his abbreviated outing, Sheehan threw 74 total pitches of which only 46 found the zone.
In Notre Dame, Tracy Smith was able to draw similarities to his own teams in the past.
“That’s a young team,” Smith said. “We went through the exact same thing last year.”
Young or old, the Sun Devils dominated in their first game of the season. Marsh’s success on the mound certainly permeated throughout his team both offensively and defensively. Ferri’s return, Torkelson’s continued dominance and everything in between was Friday night’s story, but on Saturday and beyond, it will be about how the Devils can replicate it.
For now though, in the words of ASU Senior Associate Athletic Director Don Bocchi, “If you don’t win the first game you can’t win them all.”
