This wasn’t baseball. This was an exorcism carried out by hitters who got in the zone early and often against a Miami pitching staff that could have been throwing batting practice the way the ball was flying off the Florida bats. By the time 22 hits had been pounded out, those demons of regionals past when no lead was ever safe against the Hurricanes had been removed by a relentless lineup of hitters that were buzzing in the dugout even in the first inning.
“Hitting is contagious for us,” said Florida second baseman Josh Adams, whose 2-3 effort at the plate included his eighth home run of the season as part of a nine-hit, seven-run fifth inning. “One guy will see the ball and he’ll come back into the dugout and say it looks like a beach ball.”
Perhaps it looked like a beach ball coming to the plate, but it looked rocket-propelled when it left the Florida bats. The Gators unloaded on Miami pitching for 21 of their 22 hits in the first six innings before putting it into cruise control en route to a 16-5 win that sealed up Florida’s seventh NCAA regional championship in school history.
In years past, a Florida-Miami matchup in regional play was an invitation for heartbreak but the Hurricanes were the only ones with broken hearts on this weekend. In eleven previous regionals in which the Gators and Hurricanes were paired up, Florida was sent packing.
On this weekend, however, the roles were reversed. The Gators (42-20) moved on to their third Super Regional in six years next weekend against either Southern Miss or Georgia Tech and Miami saw its season come to an inglorious end at the hands of what has been a perennial whipping boy. By the time the Gators finished the weekend, Miami pitchers bore a striking resemblance to that lasting image of cartoon character Charley Brown. You know the one — the ball gets hit back up the middle and Charley Brown is undressed. Hat, shirt, shoes, socks and glove all go flying in different directions.
That’s what Miami pitchers looked like after giving up 24 runs and 32 hits in two outings against a Florida team that caught fire.
Sunday it all started with the one-two hitters in the lineup, Avery Barnes and Jonathan Pigott. Barnes led off the game by working the count full before he watched ball four sail by, an inch or two too far outside for home plate ump David Wiley to call it a strike. Pigott followed with a line drive single over the second baseman’s head and a five-run first inning was ignited.
“Avery went to a 3-2 count and walked to lead off and then Jonathan comes up and hits a line drive over the second baseman’s head,” Florida coach Kevin O’Sullivan said. “Those two at-bats were key. If Avery swings at a ball out of the zone and leads off with a strikeout you don’t quite get off on the right foot. Two great at-bats to start the game and everything kind of snowballed after that.”
That brought Preston Tucker to the plate and that spelled bad news for Miami starter Iden Nazario, who served up the first of four Tucker hits, a single to center field that drove Barnes home and sent Pigott to third. That RBI tied Ryan Shealy’s all-time single season RBI record (81). In the fifth, Tucker drilled a fast ball over the right field fence for a two-run homer that gave him sole possession of the record.
Tucker is only a freshman and it wasn’t until the Gators were a third of the way through their season before he ever cracked the lineup on a consistent basis. He was 2-8 with no homers or RBI back a couple of months ago when Miami came to Gainesville and swept the Gators three straight.
This time around, Tucker had six hits in eight trips to the plate, good for four RBI and the Sunday homer.
“I was running up to the plate wanting to hit because everyone else was getting hits,” said Tucker, who is hitting .357 with 14 homers and 83 RBI on the season.
Everybody was running up to the plate to get a piece of the Hurricanes this weekend. The motivation was simple. Get another win. Take another step on the road that leads to Omaha for the College World Series.
Nobody was thinking about the demons that have haunted the Gators in the past whenever Miami has been the regional opponent. The Gators weren’t even thinking back to the last game of the last weekend in February when the Hurricanes blew them away, 16-2.
“We didn’t even talk about that,” O’Sullivan said. “We’re not the same team that we were the second weekend of the year.”
Since that disastrous weekend, O’Sullivan’s kids — and that’s what they are, a bunch of kids — have been on a continuous growth curve, fueled by a never say die attitude that has allowed them to come from behind in 27 of their 42 wins. They might be young, but they’re not afraid of anybody.
It shows in all those last at-bat victories. It shows in two-out rallies when they go into a feeding frenzy at the plate and string seven straight hits together like they did in the fifth inning when they expanded their lead to 14-1 Sunday evening.
“That comes from grit,” O’Sullivan said. “You grind it out and you don’t give in. Those two-out runs give a team a lot of momentum.“
Two-out, seven-run rallies also go a long way toward exorcising the demons of 11 previous regionals that pitted the Gators and Miami. Nobody was thinking about the demons when this one was over, however. There was a subdued celebration on the field that did include a Gatorade bath for O’Sullivan, but for the most part, the Gators acted like they had been down this road before.
The past is the past. Sunday night, the only thing they wanted to think about was next week and the next step on the road to Omaha.