UCLA: Baseball Begins Post Season at Home, Softball in College World Series
The national pastime has been good to Westwood this year.
After a season in which they tallied their highest number of wins in over forty years and was ranked in the top 15 for the entire campaign, including achieving the #1 spot in early April, UCLA’s baseball team will begin their quest for the College World Series in Omaha this Friday as they host a regional for the first time since 1986.
Pundits have stated that the sixth-ranked Bruins (43-13) have the toughest bracket, as Mid-American Conference Champion Kent State, Big West power UC Irvine and LSU, who’s merely the defending national champion, come to Jackie Robinson Stadium for this double elimination regional to try and earn the right to go to the best-of-3 Super Regionals later on this month.
UCLA will begin with Kent State’s Golden Flashes this Friday night, after UC Irvine’s Anteaters and LSU’s Tigers do battle. With Gerrit Cole, Trevor Bauer, Rob Rasmussen and Garret Claypool all having outstanding seasons on the mound, Coach John Savage’s Bruins have as good a chance as anyone to make it to the Super Regionals and hopefully the ultimate prize, Omaha’s Rosenblatt Stadium – it would be their first trip there since 1997, and only their third appearance in Omaha overall.
Former major league manager Gene Mauch once said that if you don’t have good pitching, you don’t have a good team. Since UCLA has had an abundance of good hurlers this season, success in this first step of the post season is not out of the question in the slightest – if the hitters, led by Dean Espy, come through, the Bruins will be in very good shape.
While the baseball version of the Bruins is trying to get to their College World Series, their softball counterparts are already heading to theirs.
After smacking around and effectively owning Louisiana Lafayette with a combined score of 20-3 over two games, invoking the mercy rule in both contests, UCLA’s softball team (45-11) will be in Oklahoma City as they are playing in the eight-team, double elimination Women’s College World Series this weekend.
Coach Kelly Inouye-Perez’s ladies, ranked #5, will take on Florida in their first contest this Thursday afternoon as they go for their 12th national championship and first since 2004.
The Bruin bats were absolutely on fire against Louisiana Lafayette’s Ragin’ Cajuns in the Super Regionals, which they hosted at UCLA, as home runs were flying out of Easton Stadium. ULL was no match for the Bruins as they lost by scores of 10-1 and 10-2, with both games going five innings.
As college softball has achieved great parity in recent years, including having the top two ranked teams, Alabama and Michigan, lose in their super regionals, the field is wide open this year. Any one of those eight teams in Oklahoma City, which includes Georgia, Tennessee, perennial power Arizona and defending champion Washington, can take home the trophy.
With that being the case, UCLA, led by national player of the year finalist Megan Lagenfeld, will have to step up, play their best softball, and in the words of the immortal John Wooden, “Be at your best when your best is needed”, as they go for the school’s 106th NCAA title and join the women’s gymnastics team among this year’s national champions in Westwood.
They way the UCLA softballers have played as of late, a championship is more than attainable – we’ll see how it goes.
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