(Photo: Sammy Nute/WCSN)
Last season, Arizona State baseball tuned into ESPN2 for the NCAA Men’s College World Series regional selection show. Players and fans watched as other at-large teams began to fill voids in the bracket, hoping the Sun Devils would be amongst them.
With a superior 16-13 record in conference play compared to Arizona’s 12-8, along with ASU being 3-2 in head-to-head matches between the two, one might think the Sun Devils earned the nod over their rivals. However, ASU watched as Arizona got selected to the tournament, and the 2023 season was officially over for the Sun Devils.
“I would say that hasn’t been forgotten,” head coach Willie Bloomquist said on Tuesday.
A major role in the selection committee’s decision to put Arizona in the tournament over ASU was how the teams played later in the season. Earlier in March 2023, the Sun Devils narrowly swept Arizona in the weekend series with two games being decided by three runs or less. Later in the season, Arizona won two midweek matchups against ASU, the first of those being a 20-0 domination and the other being decided 12-3.
Nevertheless, ASU fans and the team shared the sentiment that these matches shouldn’t have been weighed more, and the committee doing so snubbed the Sun Devils from the tournament. Bloomquist, while in agreement with this sentiment, still firmly believes that at the end of the day, the team controls their own destiny.
“I’m sure the selection criteria will probably change this year,” he said. “Bottom line is, you go try and play winning baseball and the results take care of themselves.”
Winning baseball is the philosophy that Bloomquist has for ASU, but that philosophy hasn’t materialized into results. The Sun Devils enter the weekend series with a three-game losing streak, with the most recent loss being a midweek game to New Mexico. For ASU, this gave the team and Bloomquist a wake-up call signaling that a lack of accountability was evident in the clubhouse.
“I can sit up there and talk softly, I can sit up there and scream and yell, I can sit up there and do whatever I want but it’s going to come a lot more powerful coming from a teammate,” Bloomquist said. “That’s what I’ve been asking for, for a long time around here, is for teammates to start holding each other accountable.”
Bloomquist emphasized that the lack of accountability stems from the attitude of the players toward each other. “The problem is, we need a little bit more edge. We need a little bit more willingness to call each other out,” Bloomquist said. “Right now, we have a bunch of guys that are phenomenal kids that I think are a little bit tentative to do that with each other.”
For Arizona, it’s uncertain if the team is experiencing a similar absence of accountability. However, it’s fair to say the Wildcats are entering the weekend series in almost the same boat as the Sun Devils. While ASU has played one more game, both teams have seven wins. Furthermore, both teams are coming off midweek losses to non power-five opponents, Arizona’s being to Loyola Marymount. Given this situation and the already heated rivalry, there is an added sense of pressure for the Sun Devils to reverse their fortune in the weekend series against the Wildcats.
“I told (the players), ‘if you’re not going to wake up for this one then check your pulse,’” Bloomquist said. “I don’t know if you’re alive if you’re not going to wake up and get ready to play this weekend.”
