(Photo: Nicholas Badders/WCSN)
With the count 3-1, and the bright lights of Phoenix Municipal Stadium beaming down onto the outfield grass as intensely as the rivalry match being played, Spencer Torkelson stood in the right-handed batter’s box waiting for the next pitch to come.
Randy Labaut, the left-handed Arizona Wildcat starter, was tenderly nursing a two-run deficit, his team trailing by a score of 4-2 with two outs in the bottom of the seventh inning.
Labaut went curveball away, Torkelson went to the opposite field, and the Devils led 5-2.
It was a punctuating home run. The Devils would go on to score three more two-out runs in the inning and they would ultimately beat the Wildcats by a final score of 8-2. However, for Tracy Smith and the Sun Devils (23-1, 6-1 Pac-12), this was simply game 24 of 55. The lights were shining equally as bright as any other night, and the 6,059 fans in the seats added no pressure at all.
As has been the mantra all season, it was just another game and it was to be played like there had been no games before it and not another one after.
“Our goal daily is just to chase excellence every day,” Smith said following the rivalry win. “If you’re chasing excellence every day, it doesn’t matter who you’re playing. You’re not playing the team in the other dugout. You’re playing yourself and what you’re trying to do as a team.”
What the Devils have tried to do as a team is to be better than the last two years in which they won a total of 46 games, 23 in each one. On Friday night against their arch-rival, Arizona State won its 23rd game.
“Today was a really special game,” junior Friday night starter Alec Marsh said. “How many wins we got last year? It’s 23. We got 23 tonight.”
Each at-bat is approached with laser focus and each situation is adapted to and conquered.
Last year or the year before the Devils would not have had that ability.
“Oh yeah,” Marsh said when asked if this team’s capability to rise to the occasion was far better than ever before. “It’s much better.”
In their win over the Wildcats, the Devils made sure not to overlook even the smallest of details while still approaching every moment with palpable confidence.
When Hunter Bishop got what Smith called his “only pitch to hit all night,” he deposited it over the right-center field wall for his nation-leading 15th home run of the year.
When the bases were loaded with two outs in the bottom of the seventh, Gage Workman tried not to hit the ball to the wall but simply put the ball on the right field grass for a two-RBI single.
“To answer and put it away, with two outs in the inning, who know how the rest of this goes,” Smith said of the Workman single.
So, in the Devils ability to not over-complicate situations, they make the situation more complicated for their opponents.
The offense holds strong and the pitching follows suit.
Alec Marsh earned his seventh-straight victory of the season and went more than six innings for the sixth time in seven games started.
“For him to go out and set the tone like that, really, week in and week out at this point, has been huge,” Smith said of Marsh.
From the pitching to the hitting ASU played a complete game of baseball when the pressure may have been turned up just a little bit more than usual. In their first rivalry game of the season, the bright lights shone no different than before.
