OMAHA, Neb. – When Oregon State head coach Mitch Canham sat on the dais on the press conference room at Charles Schwab Field after the Beavers’ 6-2 loss to Coastal Carolina Sunday, he felt like his team gave the game away.
“A lot of uncharacteristic mistakes made early on. Kleiny wasn’t his sharpest coming out of the gate. We had the hit batter that ended up in a strikeout and a clock violation, so some things that went in our favor, but a handful of things, like not playing clean that led to a handful of runs. All six of their runs were from free bases,” Canham said. Two errors, two walks, and two hit batters contributed to the six runs the Chanticleers score. “It was not clean baseball[.]”
But for Canham and the Beavers, the solution is to just keep going. They’ll have a light practice on Monday and the coaches will put a plan together for tomorrow afternoon’s 2 p.m. EDT elimination game against Louisville, a rematch of Friday’s nightcap that the Beavers won 4-3.
We’re going to go out… prepare for our next opponent, and continue to plug away just as we always have done. Try to make it more than it is or less than it is, and shame on you,” Canham said.
Baseball is a simple game, after all. Nearly every baseball coach will say it is ad nauseum.
In the other dugout tomorrow, Dan McDonnell’s message to his Louisville players is that they need to just be themselves.
“I am blessed because we have a lot of tough kids,” McDonnell said after Louisville’s 8-3 win against Arizona in Sunday’s elimination game.
Toughness was on McDonnell’s mind, as he often references Louisville native Muhammad Ali for inspiration, and noted that he had gotten a hug from Lonnie Ali, the wife of the late boxer and a huge baseball fan, before getting on the bus to the ballpark.
“Let’s not put up a facade and act differently because we’re playing in Omaha. We kind of have to be who we are. And I think — I don’t know if we can bust through the door now, but we got their attention. I do believe we got their attention.”
The references McDonnell makes to Muhammad Ali, the 1960 Olympics gold medalist in heavyweight boxing and heavyweight title holder, is to encourage them to do the hard work necessary to win at the highest level possible.
“As a coach, you’re just really proud when these kids buy in and take pride with the Muhammad Ali analogies. But they earned it. They worked their tail off and that’s why they’ve shown — first game of the year, I think we scored two in the ninth and then we won it in extra innings,” McDonnell said, referencing the Cardinals’ 4-3 win over Texas at the Shriners College Showdown on Valentine’s Day. “It was good because they saw the fruits early in the season, and so we haven’t been perfect this year, but we have played well in the last few innings.”
For both teams, at this time of the season, most of the hard work has been done, but there’s still preparation to do.
“We have a good practice tomorrow and we get ready to play another great opponent on Tuesday,” McDonnell said.
Canham will use his team’s light practice Monday to try and get them back to playing the tight style of baseball that got them to Omaha, rather than the occasionally sloppy style that nearly cost them their College World Series opener and lost them their second game against Coastal Carolina.
It’s a tough position to be in, but Canham noted that “the beauty is that I trust these guys to go out and take the path that we’ve chosen to take all year and battle through the other side of the bracket.”
Photo: Oregon State head coach Mitch Canham fist bumps players during introductions before an NCAA college baseball tournament super regional game against Auburn on Monday, June 13, 2022, in Corvallis, Ore. (AP Photo/Amanda Loman)
