After 26 come from behind wins, you can’t call it mission impossible anymore when the Florida Gators trail the whole game only to do a bottom of the ninth walk-off rally. That’s what they did Friday night in the first game of their NCAA Regional against Bethune-Cookman at McKethan Stadium. Down two in the bottom of the ninth, a comeback wasn’t impossible. Improbable? Perhaps. Impossible? No way.
Nothing seems impossible for these Gators, who seem to play their best baseball when they’ve got their backs to the wall and they’ve got the last at-bat. They spent the whole game battling their way back from a 4-0 deficit, going seven innings against Bethune’s Hiram Burgos, whose tantalizingly slow curve goes into free fall and drops almost into the dirt just about the time it gets to home plate. Burgos gave the Wildcats seven strong innings before he left the game after 136 pitches with a 6-3 lead.
Little did Burgos know when he finished his night’s work that the Gators had his team right where they wanted them. The Gators trimmed two runs off the lead in the bottom of the eighth, then after Ryan Durrence sent a Billy Bullock fast ball into orbit on the second pitch of the top of the ninth to make it 7-5, the stage was set for a brand new hero to keep this improbable string of comeback wins going.
The man on the hot seat was Teddy Foster, Florida’s third catcher of the night. Known more for his bat than his defense, Foster delivered a two-run single to right field that gave the Gators an 8-7 walk-off win that gives them a shot at the Miami Hurricanes — 9-4 winners over Jacksonville Friday afternoon — in the winner’s bracket game Saturday evening (6:30 p.m.).
Foster is a rarity on this team. He’s one of four seniors on a team dominated by freshmen and sophomores yet for all his years and experience, delivering game-winning hits in the bottom of the ninth isn’t exactly his specialty.
“I don’t think I’ve had a walk-off hit, probably since I was eight years old,” said Foster, who almost forgot to run his game-winner out to first base.
That’s the way it is for Kevin O’Sullivan’s Gators. Each game produces opportunities for a new hero to emerge in the most unlikely of situations. O’Sullivan is an equal opportunity guy. Give him a nine-inning game to work with and chances are he’ll run most of the way through his roster if that’s what it takes to come away with a win.
O’Sullivan’s everything but the kitchen sink philosophy got a real test against a Bethune-Cookman team determined to break the school’s 0-22 streak against Florida. He had to use 19 players in the game and about the only two that didn’t get in were pitchers Nick Maronde and Stephen Locke. One of them will face the Hurricanes Saturday evening. Well, at least one of them will start.
Starting is one thing. Finishing is another. By the time the Gators get around to finishing up a game, O’Sullivan’s been known to throw everyone with a pulse. It’s a strategy that has worked all year so there was no need to deviate Friday night.
“If our pitching can give us a chance into the sixth or seventh innings, whether it’s two guys or three guys, I like the way we’re swinging the bat and scoring runs,” O’Sullivan said.
Two or three guys? Try one starter and four relievers Friday before pitcher number six (Bullock) settled down to get the final three outs in the top of the ninth to set the stage for Foster to be the hero.
The game-winning rally got started by Preston Tucker, who has done his share of damage to opposing pitchers this year. He drilled a two-strike Burgos fast ball over the right field fence in the seventh for his 13th home run of the season but in the ninth, he went with the pitch and sent a lazy single into left field to get things going.
Standing there on first base, Tucker sensed a rally about to begin.
“The exact thing happened against Alabama when I had to lead off the inning,” Tucker said. In that game he hit a wind-blown triple to get things going in what turned out to be a monster, seven-run rally that carried the Gators to a 9-8 win over the Crimson Tide.
It’s not coincidence when the Gators start stringing hits together for late-inning and game-winning rallies. This is something they practice all the time. O’Sullivan likes three and four inning practice games. One team has something like a 3-2 or 5-3 lead and it’s up to the other team to rally for a win. When the game is over, the losing team has to run wind sprints so there is incentive to come from behind.
“There’s always some sort of punishment for the losers,” O’Sullivan said. “We ingrain that [never giving up and rallying to win] in them early on.”
It’s one thing to do it in practice when it doesn’t count. It’s something altogether different when you have to make your hits count when you’re trailing late in a ball game.
But practice pays off with that first come from behind rally that produces a win. That builds confidence and next thing you know, you’ve got a team that believes no deficit is too great to overcome.
“Once you do it once you start believing possibly, then you do it the second time and the third time,” O’Sullivan said. “That’s a hard thing for teams to figure out but once they get that Mojo you want to bottle it up because not every team experiences that but we’ve done it enough this year that it makes you feel good. They certainly believe in themselves.”
There were some stretches in the season like getting swept at home by Miami two months ago or that three-game sweep in Fayetteville against Arkansas a couple of weeks later when it looked like the Gators would never find the confidence that oozes when they take the field these days. They battled through the rough stretches and pulled out enough come from behind wins that they aren’t the least bit panicky or even mildly surprised when they rally for a win.
This is a confident team right now. Maybe they aren’t a great team quite yet, but they are a team that believes they can win no matter the situation. No matter how improbable the task, they’re willing to tackle it.
The impossible? They don’t believe it exists.