As much as Kyle Luckham’s performance in 2022 has been emphasized, it may have been understated all along. While he was in the game Wednesday afternoon, Arizona State was in control and in great position to knock off top-seed Stanford in the opening round of the Pac-12 tournament. After six good innings of work, he was lifted with a 3-2 lead. Things immediately went south for the Sun Devils, as Stanford jumped all over the ASU bullpen to go ahead and pull away late on its way to a 6-3 win.
“Kyle Luckham, you can’t say enough about him,” Willie Bloomquist said. “Gutsy performance, again went out and gave us a chance to win. We had the right guys that we wanted in there at the end too, just didn’t work out.”
Blake Pivaroff was first to follow Luckham, who went six innings, allowing two runs and striking out seven. Pivaroff has been successful in a number of spots this season but has a troubling tendency to make mistakes over the plate with a less than overwhelming high 80s fastball. He allowed a leadoff single to Stanford’s nine hitter to begin the home half of the seventh and then made one of those mistakes to leadoff hitter and preseason All-American Brock Jones. Jones doesn’t miss such mistakes, and he didn’t here. By the time his two-run blast landed, Stanford had the lead, and Luckham’s stellar outing was officially washed away.
Brock Peery entered the game in the bottom of the eighth after the ASU bats couldn’t tie the game. Arizona State’s best reliever of late suffered a similar fate to Pivaroff, as he was greeted by a leadoff single and then a towering two-run home run to stretch Stanford’s lead to the decisive 6-3.
“Not really,” Bloomquist said when asked if he considered bringing Luckham back out for the seventh inning. “We had debated even the inning before going to get him. We could tell he was starting to get tired a little bit. We had the guys we wanted; if we’re going to go down, we’re going down with the guys that got us here.”
The guys who got them here are a much blurrier picture than it may seem. Middle relievers Christian Bodlovich and Will Levine have been Bloomquist’s go-to guys in high leverage situations this season, along with Pivaroff. If planning for the week in the long haul, he may have been saving those two for deeper in the tournament.
It wasn’t just the Sun Devil bullpen that will take the blame for this loss.
The first four innings featured missed opportunity after missed opportunity for the Sun Devils at the plate. They got the leadoff man aboard in the second, third and fourth innings but couldn’t bring a run across in any of those frames. The most glaring example came in the fourth. Ryan Campos smoked his second of three leadoff singles and advanced all the way to third on a wild pickoff attempt. Following a Nate Baez walk, the Sun Devils were in business with runners at the corners and nobody out. Then, poor situational at-bats that plagued ASU early in the season showed up. Davis flew out to shallow right, Tobias struck out, and Murphy flew out to end the inning without damage.
“There’s no special formula,” Bloomquist said. “Just need to execute better.”
The dam broke in the fifth, but not without a little help. With Will Rogers standing on second base and two outs, Sean Mclain bounced a chopper towards third. As he does every time he hits a ball on the ground, McLain hustled up the line and forced an errant throw from Stanford third baseman Drew Bowser. Rogers never stopped running, and ASU took a 1-0 lead as the ball trickled into foul territory.
Stanford finished the game with three errors but added several gorgeous defensive plays to make up for them. In the top of the eighth, with ASU trailing by a run and one out, Joe Lampe ripped one into the right-center field gap. When he attempted to stretch the pivotal extra-base hit into a triple. The near perfect relay from right field beat Lampe by 20 feet. A tricky slide from the Sun Devil spark plug wasn’t enough, and the out call on the field was confirmed after replay review.
The Sun Devils tacked on two more in the sixth, with the freshmen Jacob Tobias and Will Rogers picking up back-to-back hits to regain the lead. Tobias scored from first on Rogers’ double, using a nifty side slide at home plate to resemble some of his swifter teammates. Just two pitches later, Hunter Haas doubled the lead, putting Arizona State up 3-1 with an RBI single to left.
“I think hitting’s contagious,” Sean McLain said. “Once we started early not getting runs in, it fell from there. We’ll do better tomorrow.”
Tomorrow comes up very quickly. ASU will be up early as its game against Oregon in the loser’s bracket is set for 9 a.m. AZT. A loss for the Sun Devils in that game would end their season.
“I don’t expect anything different from our guys; the effort has been there all year,” Bloomquist said. “Our guys come to play hard every day, and regardless of the outcome, we’re gonna come and play hard. I don’t expect anything different tomorrow.”
(Austin Green contributed to this article)
