(Photo: Brady Klain/WCSN)
Put a baseball game on a scale.
The first inning has both ends lined up evenly with the weight on each side distributed perfectly.
As the game progresses, the scale becomes more uneven. With each run, some weight is dropped on the side of one of the two teams, inching them ever closer to a victory.
Often times the weight is slowly compounded. There are small crucial moments, sure. But, otherwise and more commonly, the scale is tipped gradually as one team chisels away at the squad in the opposing dugout.
On Saturday night, as the No. 13 Arizona State Sun Devils (27-6, 10-4) played host to one of the nation’s best teams in No. 4 Oregon State (24-8-1, 10-4), the scale was fixed evenly for seven and a half innings. One at-bat in the top of the eighth tipped it, and Oregon State would go on to win the game 6-4.
Brady Corrigan was on the mound. His ability to block out the pressures of a baseball game had, in every situation prior to Saturday night, cemented him into the Devils’ high leverage role.
Coming into second game of the Oregon State series, he had stranded the bases loaded four times and opposing hitters were batting just .163 against him with runners in scoring position.
But, on Saturday and under Phoenix Municipal Stadium’s bright lights, the count was 2-2. Joe Casey, the Beavers’ designated hitter stood at the plate and waited as Corrigan came home with the sixth pitch of the at-bat.
The pitch was a fastball high. With no swing, it was an easily called ball. But, fooled, Casey began his swing, tried to check it and brought the bat back to shoulder. The crowd waited, Tracy Smith waited and the Beavers waited. The call came, it was a ball and the crowd roared in disproval.
The no-strike decision on a check swing that, in review of the video after the game, was objectively a swing gave Casey more opportunities to cash in with the bases loaded and it gave Corrigan more opportunities to squander the lead.
Three foul balls later, the batter won the battle.
Casey pulled a four-seam fastball to right field, two runs scored and the six Oregon State runs tallied on the scoreboard would be the final number at the end of the night.
“I’m a little disappointed because it wasn’t close,” Smith said after the game with a chance to look over the play under his belt. “Even in that you still have to play through that kind of stuff. I think he made the pitch when he needed to, and he didn’t get the call on a very clearly non-check swing. That became the game-winning hit.”
The Devils, other than the unfortunate call, did their part to keep the scale even.
Oregon State scored four runs playing small-ball, and the Devils held their end of the bargain playing by the long ball. Gage Workman hit a homer in the third and Trevor Hauver, Spencer Torkelson and Hunter Bishop went back-to-back-to-back in the sixth to knot the game back up.
But, despite the display of power, the Devils lost the game against an Oregon State team that, prior to the season, would have been expected to dismantle the Devils in a three-game series. Through two of those games, each team has one win.
The Devils lost on an at-bat and, more specifically, on a bad call that led to a game-winning at-bat.
Their play in game two was toe-to-toe with that of their Pac-12 counterpart and anecdotally it was a matchup that they held their own in while playing their brand of baseball.
“Our guys played hard, and I don’t think there was any quit in that,” Smith said. “I thought they played with good intent. We just were not the benefactors of a call and some timely hits.”
Saturday night’s loss felt like one in a vacuum. The Devils didn’t exactly lose it, one call influenced the loss and thus, the scale of the game was irreparably thrown out of balance.
“Games like this ultimately come down to pitching and defense,” Smith said. “I really think Boyd [Vander Kooi] did a good job pitching for us and holding us in their giving the team a chance to win. And, again, [Corrigan] was just the unlucky recipient of a bad call. This was just two good teams going at it.”
The Devils suffered a loss by circumstance on Saturday. Yes, there were some other moments that could have been cleaned up, but in the grand scheme of things, the game’s result can be placed on the shoulders of one call.
“That’s baseball,” Corrigan said. “Sometimes it comes down to a foot. Sometimes it’s a pitch, an at-bat, little things, they add up.”
So, after a week of struggling to get through games cleanly, Saturday night was a successful loss. It was clean and it was, in a way, excusable. The Sun Devils will have to reset the scales moving forward and be conscious of the smaller moments as it was one of those that cost them a game. The difference, however, was that one fell out of their control.
