ASU Baseball: Sun Devils prepare for 2021 with revamped, small-ball offense

(Photo: Karli Matthias/WCSN)

With Arizona State Baseball losing several offensive weapons after the COVID-19 shortened 2020 season, head coach Tracy Smith and the Sun Devils will be doing their best “Moneyball” impression in 2021.

The program has been known in recent years to be a powerful, home-run centric team, but in the offseason it lost almost all of its power in the 2020 MLB draft. Now, ASU is developing a new identity, one in which it will have to get creative with its run scoring.

“Last year we could just come out and hit bombs – Trevor (Hauver), (Spencer Torkelson) Tork, Alika (Williams), Gage (Workman) – all them could just hit bombs,” redshirt junior shortstop Drew Swift said. “So we’re going to have to be a different team this year. We’re going to have to be scrappy, be able to bunt … any way that we can scrap out runs is going to be the best thing for us.”

The impact of losing those players cannot be understated. ASU is now without three out of its four top home-run hitters from 2020. In the team’s last full season (2019), Torkelson, Hauver and Workman all had slugging percentages of at least .528 and accounted for 44 of the team’s 52 home runs. They were led by Torkelson’s 23 – good for fifth in the country and first in the Pac-12 Conference for the second straight season.

The Sun Devils are entering the 2021 season with the mentality that they can’t replace those players and can’t try to be something they are not. While recognizing they must adapt, the theme this year will be for each player to do whatever they can to help the team win.

“We all know our roles,” redshirt junior outfielder Hunter Jump said. “We’re just doing anything we can just to get the job done. ‘Know who you are’ is the main topic right now for us.”

ASU is simply playing to its strengths, as most of the hitters in the lineup fit right into that role. They see the change not as a stepback, but rather an equal opportunity to be productive offensively.

For the returners, the new small-ball strategy might take some getting used to.

But redshirt freshman outfielder Joe Lampe – a transfer from Santa Rosa College – will not have to change at all.

“Coming from junior college baseball, that was kind of more of our style,” Lampe said. “Me being a speedy, more of a contact guy, I’ve kind of played that way my whole life. It’s going to be a perfect match because we have speed that’ll let us score at any time during a game. We’ll be able to gap it, and we’re going to have a lot of runners scoring from first which is going to be huge in order for us to win games.”

Lampe has also talked about how this game plan is beneficial for the team dynamic as a whole, saying it is better to have all players with the same style rather than a couple power hitters leading the way.

“It helps us trust the process a lot more I feel like, because if you have maybe one or two guys that are hitting the home runs, there’s guys that are going to try and do that,” he said. “So I think if we can all buy into one certain goal, and we all have similar skill sets, that those skill sets are going to come together as one and help us be a strong team.”

While the Sun Devils were No. 9 nationally by D1baseball.com when the season was cut off, they start this year outside of the Top-25 in D1baseball.com’s preseason poll.

In 2020, it was Swift who proved he could be the face of the Sun Devils if need-be. He ranked first in hits (23) and second in batting average (.365) and RBI (16). Swift could have joined his fellow infielders, but MLB’s shortened draft limited his options.

Even with last year being Swift’s best of his ASU career, he remarkably didn’t fit in with the power-oriented roster.

“I never wanted to say it, but I was never one of those guys,” Swift said. “So it was kind of hard keeping up with them during BP and stuff … This team fits me way better, and so I’m ready to get after it. It’s going to be a good year.”

The revamped offense has prepared for this change by practicing situational aspects of the game, including bunting and moving runners over. Smith has said that if ASU can work walks and find different ways to get on base, it should be just fine.

But he also knows that seeing real opponents will help truly shape ASU into form, rather than just the team’s prepartions in practice.

“We just need to play somebody else to kind of figure that out,” Smith said. “But we feel like we got enough weapons to figure out a way to score runs. It may be different than what it was in the past, but we still think we’re going to be okay.”