Nothing to it as Sooners return to World Series
From Rager, to LaChance, to everybody else, Oklahoma made beating 'Bama look easy
You know how Oklahoma’s been piling runs since NCAA play began?
This was better.
You know how well freshman pitcher Cord Rager’s been pitching?
This was better, too.
You know how it’s been a whole new world since the Sooners dropped two of three its last four SEC regular-season series and its conference tourney opener?
That world just got bigger.
We’ve made much of how hot OU’s been since regional bids were awarded and still none of it foreshadowed just how easy the Sooners would make it look upon returning to Omaha and the College World Series.
Saturday afternoon, OU dispatched Alabama 9-0 like it was a walk in the park, earning a day off and the honor of remaining in the winners’ bracket, which is kind of everything.
So good, the only negative anyone might level at the Sooners, who spent four years away from the CWS since reaching its best two-of-three championship series in 2022, would be to accuse them of peaking too early.
They were that good.
Let’s begin with Rager, who never lost his job in coach Skip Johnson’s rotation even as he pitched to a higher earned run average than those who did. Since NCAA play began, he’d thrown 12 innings, allowed eight hits and three runs, walked one and struck out 14 prior to Saturday.
All good.
Saturday, he threw seven innings for the first time, allowed three hits, no runs, walked nobody, plunked one and struck out eight, the last three Tide batters he faced included, the very last one being Eric Hines, after which ESPN analyst Ben McDonald called Rager “as dirty as a Bourbon Street martini.”
You’ve got to love it.
Rager did it all in 88 pitches (63 strikes). Along the way, he became the first freshman in World Series history to throw four no-hit innings and pushed his personal scoreless-inning streak to 15, which is bananas.
Then there’s catcher Deiten LaChance, who’d led OU with three home runs and 11 RBIs since NCAA play began, yet who severely twisted his left ankle rounding second base following Jaxon Willits’ first-inning single.
The rest of the way, LaChance limped horribly; when he ran, when he backtracked from the plate to catch a foul ball, when he went in and out of the dugout.
But he never left the game, made it home on Trey Gambill’s two-run first inning double to the right-center field gap, and two at bats later delivered the contest’s biggest blow, a screaming two-run sixth-inning home run that left his bat at 110 miles per hour and traveled 410 feet without hardly getting in the air, finishing beyond the bullpen tucked behind the left-field fence.
After Jason Walk walked to begin the top of the eighth, LaChance’s single was the first of five Sooner hits to produce four more Sooner runs. Even the double play he hit into in the third inning plated OU’s third run.
He wasn’t all.
Every Sooner in the lineup but nine-hole hitter Kyle Branch finished with at least a hit and OU finished with 11 total, creating its offense from the ground up, scoring all its runs with the benefit of just three walks and one hit batsman.
In the two-game super-regional round at Kansas, Jayhawk pitchers walked or plunked 14 Sooners.
This is how good it went for OU.
In the bottom of the sixth, after Alabama’s John Lemm and Eric Hines led off with back-to-back singles, Crimson Tide coach Rob Vaughn, his team down 3-0, for no apparent good reason, sent seven-hole hitter Brennan Holt to the plate to sacrifice.
Holt jabbed at the ball a couple times only to produce a two-strike count. Then, also for no apparent good reason, OU kept its corner infielders in rather than sending them back to regular depth.
Holt then lashed a hard ground ball, but with a garden hop, to first baseman Dayton Tockey, who turned and threw to shortstop Willits, covering second base, who fired back to Tockey at first and the Sooners were all but out of the frame. Next up, Luke Vaughn grounded to Branch at second base and they were out of it.
Easy peasy.
The twin-killing wasn’t OU’s only defensive moment.
After giving up a leadoff single to Holt in the eighth, Sooner reliever L.J. Mercurious got Vaughn on strikes before Peyton Steele hit into a 6-4-3 double play to end the frame.
A tough day for Steele, no Tide batter hit the ball harder than he did in the third inning, only for Sooner third baseman Cam Johnson to spear it with a dive and throw him out.
The Sooners’ last error came 26 innings ago, when Johnson misplayed Kansas’ Dylan Schlotterback’s ground ball.
OU and Alabama met for a three-game set the first weekend of April in Tuscaloosa. Alabama won the opener 10-7. OU won the next one 4-2. Alabama won the next one 3-2. Rager, out with an oblique strain, did not pitch.
A blessing in disguise?
Or maybe the Dodgers weren’t doing anything against Rager on Saturday either.
Georgia and Texas are playing right now and the Sooners get the winner at 6 p.m. Monday.
Texas swept OU the last weekend of March. Georgia and OU have not met.
No matter.
The Sooners have reinvented themselves.
Perhaps into the nation’s best team.