Ryan McGee - The Road to Omaha: Hits, Hopes, and History at the College World Series

The Road to Omaha

ALSO BY RYAN McGEE

ESPN Ultimate NASCAR

at the

by

Ryan McGee

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS | ST. MARTINS PRESS | NEW YORK

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS .
An imprint of St. Martins Press.

THE ROAD TO OMAHA . Copyright 2009 by Ryan McGee. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com

Book design by Rich Arnold

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-55723-2

ISBN-10: 0-312-55723-X

First Edition: May 2009

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To the Little Sioux Four:
Josh Fennen, Aaron Eilerts, Sam Thomsen, and Ben Petrzilka

THE ROAD TO OMAHA

At 1:00 A.M. on Thursday morning, June 12, 2008, the red Arrow bus turned right off of Interstate 80, climbing up the off-ramp of Exit 454. This was the last exit in Omaha, the final stop in Nebraska before the big highway leapfrogged the Missouri River and landed in Council Bluffs, Iowa en route to all points east.

Seconds earlier, the Fresno State University Bulldogs baseball team had been a typical bunch of chattering college students, carrying on about breaking balls, video games, and girls. Then someone spotted the big green road sign that read, EXIT 454, 13TH STREET SOUTH, STADIUM .

In an instant, they fell silent.

Bus driver Chris Clark chuckled as his suddenly serious passengers scrambled for the windows, glancing into the rearview mirror as he thought to himself, Gets them every time.

There it is! Someone shouted it from the left side of the aisle, causing everyone to jump up and cram into the shouters half of the bus. As the trees whipped by, the big black left-field scoreboard began rising into view, topped by the light-traced letters of a semicircle sign, a beacon calling out to baseball fans as if it were their mother ship.

ROSENBLATT. HOME OF THE NCAA MENS COLLEGE WORLD SERIES .

The image hardly seemed real. Like every college baseball team, the Bulldogs had talked about Rosenblatt, read about Rosenblatt, seen it on TV, and set it up on a pedestal as the ultimate goal of the season and of their college careers.

Now there it was, and in thirty-six hours they would be one of only eight teams allowed to stand on that field as participants in the 2008 College World Series (CWS).

As they pulled into the parking lot the experience became even more dreamlike. The stadium even had a kind of aural glow about it, a halo provided by the nighttime bank of lights coming off the field and into the rainy night. A hardball mirage in the middle of the gridiron-crazy Great Plains.

Down on that field were a handful of stadium security team members sitting on folding chairs, keeping an eye on the diamond while fighting to stay awake. When asked if they heard voices in the outfield or saw spirits in the grandstands during those long nights, the sentries admitted that they did feel a presence. Its not a voice or a ghost or anything like that, said one police officer. But theres something in there with you at night. I keep expecting Shoeless Joe Jackson and Moonlight Graham to come walking in across the outfield.

Joe never played at Rosenblatt, but Joba did, the baby-faced ace of the Nebraska Cornhuskers long before he was Mr. Chamberlain, toast of Yankee Stadium. Moonlight Graham never sat in the Rosenblatt dugout, but Rice University head coach Wayne Graham had and would again in 2008, his seemingly annual return to unleash yet another missile-throwing Rice Owl pitching staff on an unfortunate opponent. The ghosts of the dugouts still talk about his army of Texas-grown arms that hurled their way to the schools first NCAA championship in 2003 by mowing down an all-star team of traditional baseball powerhouses.

That same mound was once the launching pad for a kid named Dave Winfield, who struck out twenty-nine batters for Minnesota in two days in the summer of 73. Eight years later that pile of dirt was the ring in which Frank Viola of St. Johns and Yales Ron Darling slugged it out for eleven shutout innings, carrying dual shutouts into the eleventh and twelfth innings, Darling yielding no hits, before St. Johns won in the twelfth. The clash was so moving that Hall of Famer Smoky Joe Wood, a man who pitched against Christy Mathewson and who was a teammate of Cy Young, said a better game had never been thrown in all of baseball.

In 1983, a fresh-faced Texan named Roger Clemens toed that same rubber, joined by college pal and future Red Sox teammate Calvin Schiraldi. The Rocket may have been leaner than his more-recognized future Fenway and Yankee personas, but as he won the Series clincher he was certainly no less intimidating at twenty-one than he was at thirty-one or forty-one.

That same year, Arizona States Barry Bonds roamed the Rosenblatt outfield along with Oklahoma State man-child Pete IncavigliaInkywho drew a crowd of thousands just to watch him take batting practice. And Michigan infielders Chris Sabo and Barry Larkin were in the formative years of a relationship that would win them a World Series with the Cincinnati Reds seven years later.

As their careers moved on past Omaha, each athlete became more famous on much bigger stages for his play, his earnings, and in some cases his flaws. But here at Rosenblatt they were all still kids playing a kids game.

Its the kind of game that still leaves people shaking their heads in disbelief when they stand over at first base. Thats where the entire 82 Miami Hurricanes baseball team (including the batgirls) should have been awarded an Oscar nomination for their ability to sell a hidden ball trick so masterful that it has its own nicknamethe Grand Illusion. That same corner of the diamond is where Oklahoma States Robin Venturas fifty-eight-game hit streak died, where North Carolinas hopes for the 2006 title went wide right, and where Louisiana State Universitys Warren Morris suddenly leapt into the air, realizing that he hadnt slapped a game-tying hit, but rather he had won the national championship with a two-run homer.

Second base was once the domain of Arizona States Bob Horner, who played at Rosenblatt one day and who was on the field with the Atlanta Braves the next. In 1951, a Popeye look-alike named Don Zimmer manned that same second bag, breaking in the dirt that would later be kicked around and dived into by the likes of Californias Jeff Kent and LSUs Todd Walker.

Round the horn at shortstop and third they still play the infield in and guard the line just like Georgia Techs Nomar Garciaparra, University of Southern Californias Roy Smalley, Long Beach States Jason Giambi, and Minnesotas Paul Molitor.

Since 1950, they came to Omaha by van, train, and plane. In the old days they stayed in local university dormitories and rode in bouncy yellow school buses. Over the years the dorm rooms became hotel suites and the bats went from ash to alloy, but while the rest of the collegiate sports world became buried under money, the College World Series and its comfy old blue home managed to preserve its sense of innocence and wonder. The administrators and event coordinators could have made more cash if theyd wanted to, just as the student-athletes couldve copped an attitude if theyd so desired. Instead, everyone was kept in line by the ghosts of Rosenblatt...