UCLA baseball isn’t your typical powerhouse — but the Bruins keep winning
Michael Toglia is drafted right before UCLA’s regional game vs. Loyola Marymount, and he gets a reaction from his teammates and his family. (0:39)
LOS ANGELES — UCLA baseball coach John Savage has been around long enough to witness an array of extenuating circumstances cripple teams this time of year, chief among them the just-completed MLB draft. He has seen bad teams get hot and make deep runs through the College World Series, and good teams — great teams — crumble before even arriving there.
Baseball can act strangely when reduced to small sample sizes, especially when the vast majority of those playing it are teenagers. The most talented teams don’t often thrive in the collegiate playoffs. The ones that do, Savage said, possess lots of pitching, particularly in their bullpen. But they’re also “mentally tough,” hardened by prior failures and better for overcoming them.
And that, perhaps, is why this UCLA team might just be different.
The Bruins were the No. 1-ranked team in the nation for 11 consecutive weeks heading into the postseason. They set a program record for wins, didn’t lose a weekend series all year and boasted the lowest ERA in the nation. But they didn’t just breeze into the super regionals (where they’ll host Michigan in a best-of-three series from Jackie Robinson Stadium that begins Friday at 6 p.m. PT on ESPN2). They aren’t your typical powerhouse.
“Totally not,” senior outfielder Jake Pries said. “Totally not the deal.”
The Bruins — with a 48-8 record by the end of May and 13 players drafted at the start of June — believe they’re a team built on perseverance. They’ll point to the injuries they overcame, such as their ace, Ryan Garcia, missing time early and their No. 2 starter, Zach Pettway, no longer being available. They’ll bring up how Chase Strumpf, Jeremy Ydens and Michael Toglia, their three Preseason All-Americans, spent a bulk of this season either struggling or injured, prompting others to step up.
They’ll reference all those comebacks (21), all those walk-offs (four) and all those times (against Georgia Tech, USC and Stanford) when they lost a Friday game on the road and came back to win two straight.
They’ll point to last weekend.
UCLA lost a nail-biter to Loyola Marymount on the Saturday of the regional tournament, thrusting itself into an unenviable situation — having to win three consecutive games in two days, with its two best starting pitchers essentially out of the picture.
The Bruins’ quest began less than 14 hours after their first loss in nearly five weeks, a circumstance Savage described as “brutal” and “unfair.” The UCLA players went to bed around midnight, ate and dressed in time to catch a 9 a.m. bus, stepped on the field three hours later, then used four home runs and six pitchers to win the first of a doubleheader. Later that afternoon, a freshman named Nick Nastrini made his first appearance in more than three months and set the tone with five innings of one-run ball, a start Savage deemed one of the best he’d seen in 15 years at UCLA.
On Monday, for the decisive rematch against LMU, their leadoff hitter was sick and their three best relievers were exhausted. The Bruins trailed by two runs after the first half-inning and somehow found a way, advancing to the super regionals for the first time since 2013 — the year of the first and only national championship in program history.
“It showed us that when we face adversity,” Pries said, “we’re a tough team.”
Dr. Ken Ravizza, one of the most renowned sports psychologists in the nation, made a profound impact on countless collegiate and professional baseball players before he died last summer. Some of that influence, Savage will tell you, is felt on this UCLA team. He referenced some of Ravizza’s popular terms — “red light,” “green light,” “circles” — and how his players have used them as tools to compartmentalize their focus and remain present. They sped their growth.
“He’s made me a much better person, a much better coach — handling players, the timing of messages to players,” Savage said. “It’s hard to put your finger on it, but it’s just, the leadership is there. They believe in one another, and they understand.”
That understanding might have been lacking in prior years. Strumpf noticed it two years ago, on a Bruins team that had high hopes but was also exceedingly young. UCLA stumbled through the regular season and didn’t win a single game in the regional tournament. Strumpf said they “took a lot of lessons from that season.”
“We weren’t tough enough,” he said. “Bottom line.”
The Bruins have been building toward this, when the ballyhooed freshman class of two years ago could mold itself into a group polished enough to make a push for another title. It’s evident now. In Garcia and Jack Ralston, the Bruins have a devastating 1-2 punch at the top of their rotation. They also have a dominant back end of the bullpen, with Nathan Hadley in the seventh, Kyle Mora in the eighth and Holden Powell in the ninth. Their offense features three players — Strumpf, Toglia and Ryan Kreidler — taken within the first four rounds earlier this week.
“A lot of those guys had an opportunity to fail as freshmen and start in a lot of games; they have a lot of at-bats under their belts, so you really have to pitch them and change your patterns against them because they’re intelligent,” LMU coach Jason Gill said. “They’re athletic, they’re big, they’re good at baseball, and they’re well-coached. You add those things up, and you have the No. 1 team in the country.”
The Bruins are looking to become the first No. 1 seed to win the College World Series since Miami in 1999. By winning two of three against Michigan — one of only nine teams to beat them this season — they’ll become the first No. 1 seed to reach the College World Series after falling into the losers’ bracket in its regional tournament.
It’s their last chance to take advantage of one of the most talented crop of players in program history.
“There’s no pressure,” Pries said. “If we played with the feeling that there was pressure, we wouldn’t be in this situation coming out of the losers’ bracket. We faced three games with elimination, and you couldn’t tell we were facing elimination.”