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PROVO — The last time the BYU baseball team played in an NCAA regional, sophomore Jordan Wood had just graduated to taking pitches from his youth league coach.
When the Cougars take the field Thursday in their opening game of the NCAA Tournament against Cal State Fullerton, Wood will slot into his place in the pitching rotation for the Cougars.
“I was probably in first or second grade, and didn’t hardly know about BYU,” said Wood, whose team will open the Stanford regional at 2 p.m. MDT on ESPN3. “I was still in coach pitch in Texas, and it had nothing to do with BYU.”
Yet without Wood and a deep list of BYU pitchers that also includes presumed starter Cory Corless, Maverik Buffo and relievers like Mason Marshall and Keaton Cenatiempo, the Cougars’ dreams likely would’ve died a week ago at Banner Island Ballpark, the home of Oakland’s Class-A affiliate in Stockton, California.
BYU (37-19) lost its first game of the West Coast Conference tournament to Loyola Marymount, and any shot at a regional berth meant winning four games in two days, including a two-game WCC championship.
“We were all a little mad we lost to LMU in the first game,” said Wood, who has a 5.03 ERA and a 5-0 record in 39⅓ innings. “We had a great pitching performance, and our hitting was pretty good; we just needed a couple more clutch hits.”
Then something happened before wins over Saint Mary’s and the Lions on Friday afternoon before Saturday's two-game final against Gonzaga.
“It just suddenly clicked, and we all meshed together for the rest of the tournament,” Wood said.
BYU coach Mike Littlewood called such a comeback “virtually impossible” prior to the tournament. But Littlewood’s six-year tenure with his alma mater has been about turning the “virtually impossible” into “probable.”
“Pretty much everything had to go our way,” Littlewood told KSL Sports after learning the Cougars’ draw before Monday’s practice. “We made great plays, we swung the bat 1-9 in almost every spot with multiple hits, and we got great pitching performances. That’s what had to happen.
“We got five starts that were career starts, and saved our bullpen for the end, and it ended up paying off.”
After a standout coaching career at Dixie State that included four Junior College World Series appearances and the 2004 NJCAA national title, Littlewood has taken BYU baseball from a sub-.500 record to its first NCAA bid since 2002. The ballclub’s WCC tournament title is the first WCC tourney championship in a men’s sport other than cross-country and golf since leaving the Mountain West in 2011.
Getting back to the NCAA regional in today’s college baseball world is a major step. The Cougars’ two-game defeat of Gonzaga cost the regular-season co-champion Bulldogs a berth in the national title by fewer than six spots, according to the NCAA selection committee.
BYU will represent the WCC in the Stanford regional, which includes the host Cardinal, Western Athletic Conference champion Sacramento State and Cal State Fullerton. They'll also take up the banner of the state of Utah a year after two teams (Utah and Utah Valley) from the Beehive State were invited to a regional with autobids.
The Titans (34-21) are a commuter school of about 40,000 students located just off the freeway in Orange County, California. But their brand in baseball is among the best in the nation; the Titans earned their 26th straight regional bid despite a third-place finish behind Long Beach State and Cal Poly in the Big West Conference. They’ve won four national championships in baseball, and never had a losing season in Division I.
“Cal State Fullerton is a really good team with a lot of tradition and history. They have really good players, and it’s going to be a battle,” Littlewood said, before adding his team can compete with anyone. “I feel like our mentality is really good right now: we’re just going to compete our tails off, and see what happens.”
BYU has a secret weapon, and it’s not just the bats of sluggers like Bronson Larsen, who averages .344 at the plate with a .651 slugging percentage.
“This team in general has got a crazy dynamic of all different guys,” said Larsen, the WCC tournament MVP with 16 home runs on the year. “But we’ve meshed together, and just have a lot of fun. That’s what it boils down to.”
The line between “good” and “great” in Division I baseball is blurring faster than nearly any other college sport; last year’s champion Coastal Carolina didn’t make the field of 64 in 2017. Continued success is hard to achieve in a sport more affected by the professional draft than any other in the NCAA.
But Littlewood is making good on his promise six years ago to athletic director Tom Holmoe to be nationally relevant in a sport that gave him his BYU education.
“I think a regional is a benchmark,” Littlewood said. “If you want to have a good program, you’ve got to at least be in the conversation for a regional if you don’t win your league outright.”
