(Photo: Nicholas Badders/WCSN)
Despite the marathon that is a baseball season, whether it be the 162-plus game gauntlet of the Major League campaign or the 50-plus game trek to Omaha for the collegiate game, every game has to be approached with a playoff-like desire to win in order to give yourself the best possible chance to succeed.
Whether a team is playing a three-game weekend series against the defending national champions in conference play, or hosting a midweek game against a team with single-digit wins, the hunger for a win has to be there every single night.
Arizona State baseball found themselves in the position of the latter heading into Tuesday night’s tilt with the Seattle University Redhawks (8-26), looking for any way to recapture their undeniable swagger that has largely abandoned them in the last two weeks-plus.
Behind gutsy bend-but-don’t-break pitching and a methodical offensive approach, the No. 16 Sun Devils (28-7) came out on top 12-5.
Sun Devil head coach Tracy Smith handed the ball to sophomore Brady Corrigan for his first start of the season after making 16 relief appearances, with the familiar midweek mindset that it was going to be all-hands-on-deck out of the bullpen to follow.
Corrigan fought his way out of trouble in a first inning that saw him walk in a run with the bases loaded but limit the damage to just two runs, then worked around pair of errors in the second to finish his night with three hits, three walks and three runs in three innings pitched.
“We’ve asked a lot of him,” Smith said. “He’s going to take the baseball whenever he’s asked. It wasn’t his sharpest performance, I think he’d tell you the same thing, but he competed. He just wasn’t real sharp tonight which that happens sometimes.”
While Corrigan and junior Chaz Montoya put forth solid efforts toward the win, it was a quartet of freshmen that shone the brightest for Arizona State on this night, as Marc Lidd, Luke LaFlam and Will Levine combined to throw four innings while allowing two hits, two runs, and striking out seven, and Erik Tolman went 3-4 with two home runs and four RBI from the eighth spot in the lineup.
The home runs for Tolman, the first two of his collegiate career, are another box checked for the freshman out of Lake Forest, Calif. in a campaign that has already seen plenty of impressive moments in high-leverage situations adjusting to the college game.
“I think I’ve progressed dramatically… my whole idea is play where my feet are,” Tolman said. “If I’m on the field, I’m only thinking about the batter, and the defense, and me on the mound. So I definitely have zoned out the televised games and I’ve been doing a lot better.”
“He’s just a gamer. Erik Tolman the gamer, that’s how we describe him,” shortstop Alika Williams said.
While Tolman has factored in squarely to both the pitching and offensive blueprints of this team so far this season, the remaining three are still trying to solidify their roles to Smith and the coaching staff with the opportunities presented to them.
Lidd in particular, recruited along with Tolman as legitimate two-way players, has recorded 10.1 innings in the last two weeks and seems to be slowly working his way up the totem pole out of the bullpen arms.
“Definitely not this much,” Lidd said when asked if he expected to be used in this capacity on the mound. “I knew I had it in me, and when [pitching coach Mike Cather] said ‘Hey can you pitch?’, and I did well my first couple of times, I knew that I was going to be able to pitch and help the team.”
“It was big for [Lidd, Montoya, Levine and LaFlam] to come in and just fill [up the strike zone], that’s all we could ask for. It’s a lot more fun to play behind that then, walks I guess. And they know that,” Williams said with a chuckle.
For any team in college baseball that starts out 25-1, the thoughts of hosting a regional and perhaps earning a national seed naturally start to become tangible in everybody’s mind.
For Arizona State, owners of a 3-6 record in their last nine games including tonight, the goal is still within reach but only attainable if the attention to detail that was present seemingly on every pitch in the first half of the season returns.
“Every game’s important if you want to host,” Smith said. “We got a lot of baseball left to play, these are the games you have to win, because there’s some pretty good teams around the country. You just don’t want to let any get away. So we’re going to treat it that way again, we’re going to take it one game at a time, but we realize there’s a lot left to play.”
