Spend just a few hours at the nine-day extravaganza known as the College World Series and the true essence of the event becomes apparent.
It’s about baseball and the purity of competition. It’s about a city welcoming players into their collective home, Rosenblatt Stadium.
Most of all it’s about hands.
It’s about the right hand of Jeremy Guthrie, Stanford’s ace pitcher. More precisely it’s about his right arm and the 119 pitches he squeezed out of it during a gritty weekend effort to beat Notre Dame only a couple of weeks after he’d thrown 144 pitches over 13 innings to hold off Cal State Fullerton in the regional.
It’s about the right fist of Notre Dame’s Ryan Stavisky, thrust forcefully into the air after he’d hit a game-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth to eliminate Rice on Monday. It’s about the high-fives from an entire squad jumping off the bench to greet a teammate who scored an important run or congratulate a pitcher who closed out a tough inning.
It’s about the tears being discreetly wiped away by players sent home after two losses.
Collegiate baseball is often dismissed as low level, the argument being that the best players already have been drafted and are part of major league baseball’s minor-league system. The best of the rest go play in college, aluminum bats in hand.
Guthrie, a first-round draft pick of the Cleveland Indians earlier this month, helps prove that assumption wrong. So did Mark Prior, a recent addition to the Cubs’ starting rotation, who starred in Omaha for Southern Cal last season. Roger Clemens played in the CWS for Texas, Barry Bonds for Arizona State.
“It’s not high glamor, but it’s a great experience for the players,” said Stanford coach Mark Marquess, an Omaha perennial who has had his Cardinal in the CWS four straight years. “This is a bowl-game sort of atmosphere, but it’s much less corporate and more of a family thing. It’s tradition with Midwest values, and when you think about it, that’s what the game of baseball is all about.”
Ryan Mueller and Mike Doucha, 14-year-olds from Omaha, were in a group of 3,000 who stood in line for hours in the stadium corridors last week collecting autographs from the participating teams, a CWS tradition. Their baseballs included the signatures of participants ranging from Clemson shortstop Khalil Greene, the NCAA Player of the Year, to Rice’s backup catcher.
Notre Dame pitching coach Brian O’Connor, a native of nearby Council Bluffs, Iowa, remembers coming to the autograph session with his dad as a 6-year-old. It became an annual event, and over the years O’Connor collected the signatures of Clemens and Mississippi State’s Bobby Thigpen, among others.
Notre Dame catcher Paul O’Toole, a World Series newcomer, spent three hours signing autographs, but he had prepared himself.
“When I played with guys from Cal State Fullerton in the Cape Cod League, they’d talk about how long that autograph session goes,” O’Toole said. “They seemed to take it for granted. I knew if I ever made it here, I would take in every single moment. That’s exactly what I’m doing.”
Jack Diesing Jr. is president of the College World Series of Omaha Inc., which runs the tournament in conjunction with the NCAA. The group, founded by his father, Jack Sr., took over a few years after some local businessmen persuaded the NCAA to relocate the tournament from Wichita, Kan., in 1949.
Omaha has a contract with the NCAA through 2010, and Diesing predicts the CWS will not leave the city in his lifetime. The seating capacity at Rosenblatt Stadium has been increased from 15,000 to more than 23,000, and in part because of ESPN’s enthusiastic TV coverage, the College World Series has become a bona fide event, if not the pride of Omaha.
“I can’t tell you how many parents of players and Notre Dame administrators have commented to me on how great Omaha is,” said O’Connor, the closer on Creighton’s 1991 World Series entry that was coached by Jim Hendry, the Cubs’ current assistant general manager.
Diesing can only smile at such reviews.
“This is a wholesome atmosphere where it’s, `You are my friend and it’s nice to have you here,'” he said. “You’re sitting in the stands next to someone from out of town, but you have known them from this event for five or six years.
“Of course there’s also no booing.”
Rod Dedeaux, the former USC baseball coach who won 10 NCAA championships, gripped a walking cane fashioned from a baseball bat as he talked about a group of players from his title team of 30 years ago getting together in Omaha for a reunion this week.
He mentioned the electricity in the city, from the cab drivers to the hotel staffs to the people on the street. He noted how knowledgeable World Series fans are and how their expectations for great baseball, along with their impeccable behavior, make the teams try that much harder.
And they love an underdog.
“They give you great support unless you win too often,” Dedeaux said with a laugh. “We got booed a lot. I would meet various people when I came back here over the years, and I would recognize their voices from the booing.”
Ultimately it’s about the baseball mitt on Ryan Kalita’s left hand and the disposable camera in his right as the Irish pitcher sat talking in the stands. It was the practice day for all eight teams, the first official function of the Series last Thursday.
No action was too small or insignificant for Kalita to chronicle. It took the Fighting Irish 45 years to make a return trip to the Series, and sometimes one appearance has to last a lifetime.
“Do you realize how many players want to make it here?” Kalita asked. “It’s the best thing you can achieve at this level.”
