The third year of a coaching staff in any sport is the one that’s expected to show results. This new group comes in, works through its growing pains, and hits the gas pedal after getting multiple full-season experiences. For the Arizona State Baseball staff, the program’s previous two seasons have set them up to take the next step, which is a return to an NCAA Regional. After all, head coach Willie Bloomquist expects no less from “MLBU” in his third season at the helm.
“Better and better each year,” Bloomquist emphasized as the program goal. “The guys are buying into the work ethic that it takes, the daily grind that it takes, to be good. From that standpoint, I couldn’t be happier. Guys are working hard, taking every rep with intention. It’s a big key to what we’re trying to do. You can go out and take a million reps, but if you have zero intention with it, that’s wasting it.”
After everything that could go wrong did in his first year of coaching, Bloomquist went into 2023 with a fresh slate, considering ASU’s influx of new players. While last year’s group showed a lot of promise, they also fell short of the NCAA Tournament due to a late-season slump. While Opening Day is still in the distant future, a sense of urgency has already been built in each and every member of the clubhouse to finish the job in 2024.
“(They’re) Going out with a different focus,” Bloomquist noticed of his returning players. “Certainly, the guys that were here last year are going in with a different look in their eyes than they did a year ago.”
As for this year’s group of diamond Devils, ASU returns plenty of offensive production, including program stalwarts Ryan Campos and Jacob Tobias, as well as freshman breakouts Nick McLain and Nu’u Contrades. Bloomquist expects this nucleus at the plate to keep the Sun Devils in the upper echelon nationally.
“We do have some veteran guys, and that’s gonna be the strength of our team,” Bloomquist exclaimed. “They’re gonna be expected to hold down the fort and do things the right way. The good thing right now is we got 13 or 14 strong, solid bats. There’s gonna be a fight at the bat rack a little bit. We got some depth, which is nice. There will be some guys that better not get too comfy with their jobs. We have a lot of guys that can swing the bat this year, which I’m excited about. A couple of freshmen have come in and swung the bats well. I’m anxious to see how they respond in game situations.”
“There’s a ton of talent on this team,” hitting coach Brett Wallace added. “There’s young guys, there’s transfers, there’s returners. I’ve been very impressed with a lot of their swings. I get the chance to watch a lot of videos on them, and I get a chance to observe a lot of the stuff they’re doing. There’s a lot of talent.”
Making his debut season on the Sun Devil coaching staff, Brett Wallace brings six years of MLB experience, and he’s eager to share the secrets of the bigs with not only those premier returners but plenty of newcomers as well.
“For me, as a hitter, I learned who I was as a hitter, what made me tick, what routine worked for me, how to study video and how to create a gameplan when you face another team, things like that,” Wallace noted. “That’s definitely something I’m gonna be involved in and try to show Willie and them what I see and just give them a resource and see if it adds any value.”
As a former Sun Devil, Wallace’s already approachable aura increases within the clubhouse, and it’s that kind of relationship that can run off positively on everyone at the bat rack. And there will be plenty of players vying for at-bats, as Bloomquist and Wallace rave about the depth this lineup has in comparison to a season ago.
“A lot deeper (this year),” per Bloomquist. “There’s no easy outs, that one through nine. We’re gonna have a handful of guys off the bench that situationally come in and do damage off the bench, too. We didn’t have that, I don’t think, a year ago. There’s gonna be a lot of guys fighting for playing time. A lot of guys are capable of starting. It’s a good problem to have.”
“It’s an amazing thing for a team,” Wallace continued. “It’s a problem that Willie, I’m sure, would love to have. It’s a manager’s problem; he’s gotta figure out the matchups and get guys into all those things. There are a lot of options at different spots. But in the same sense, it takes a lot of guys. It’s not nine, it’s as many as you can have. There’s gonna be injuries, there’s gonna be slumps, there’s gonna be matchups that aren’t great. Having those opportunities definitely adds to the team and gives you a bigger margin for error.”
While the Sun Devils remain as formidable as ever in the box, it’s a different story on the mound. The entirety of ASU’s weekend rotation, along with much of its bullpen, heard their names called in the MLB Draft last summer, losing contributors such as Ross Dunn, Khristian Curtis, Timmy Manning, Owen Stevenson, and Blake Pivaroff, among others. Rebuilding this pitching staff is no easy task for any program, but ASU is trying its best to do it with a highly touted group of freshman arms set to impact the team.
“We have a lot of freshmen on the pitching staff that’ll get challenged,” Bloomquist noted. “We have some guys that can swing the bat a little bit. So, we’ll see where they stand real quick.”
What this staff is particularly excited about, though, is the fact that these incoming pitchers will be the first group fully recruited by Bloomquist and company.
“With where we’ve been the last couple years, with not having any freshmen arms, it’s very hard to build when you don’t have any freshmen arms from two years in a row,” Bloomquist explained. “That’s just part of what we got dealt, and we have to adjust to it. We wanted to make sure we didn’t make that mistake again. We have a lot coming in, we have a lot of left-handers coming in, which excites me too. Strong contingent of local kids that are here too, very talented local kids too. I’m anxious to see how they perform.”
“I feel like the last three years I’ve been out here, it’s been new arms,” pitching coach Sam Peraza said. “The difference is we have a lot of freshmen arms tis year. It’s been an exciting chance to work with them, there’s a lot of arms there, so we’ll see when we get started this weekend. The intra-squads will tell a lot. The good thing about freshman arms is that this is finally our group of arms. When we got here, we didn’t really have time to recruit. It took us two years to really get our freshman arms here on campus. This is the group we’ve had a relationship, now three years with.”
“Sammy has his work cut out for him again, for the third year in a row,” Bloomquist said. “He’s dealing with brand new guys for the third year in a row. It excites me a little bit for him that we do have a lot of freshmen that we can actually start building with from one year to the next, so he can work with guys for more than one year before they move on.”
“They’re gonna be thrown into the fire right away,” Peraza exclaimed.
Luckily for Peraza, he’ll hope to have a veteran arm at the forefront of the rotation. Missing all of last year with a shoulder injury, Tyler Meyer was a solidified part of the 2022 staff, and ASU’s coaches are hoping to get that version of him back not just to get outs on the mound but to mentor the young guns as well.
“Tyler’s gonna work really, really hard to get himself ready to go,” Peraza said. “He’s a really hard-working kid…If Tyler’s back, you guys know what that does to our staff. We got some talented freshmen that we can move around lower with some experienced guys. Tyler swings this whole thing for us. If we get him back, we’re really excited.”
With plenty of different baseball backgrounds in the clubhouse, Bloomquist and company have their hands full in getting the group to mesh as well as last year’s. Bloomquist, though, sees it as a part of college athletics in today’s day and age, with ASU not being the only team in the country with plenty of new faces. Regardless, a team still has to be put together, one way or another.
“That’s the challenge of the landscape we’re in now, with the transfer portal and different guys coming in,” Bloomquist said. “I’ve always said from day one that the scenario we inherited, this is gonna be the year where hopefully we kinda have the great reset on the mound, and hopefully we don’t have to go out and get a bunch of transfer portal guys moving forward. Building with our own position players and our own freshman arms, we can start doing it this year. That excites me because I don’t wanna have to live in the portal every year.”
What also excites Bloomquist is the players who have grown up in this program to now take the reigns as leaders on and off the field, such as Ryan Campos and Jacob Tobias.
“It’s time for them to step up and be a little bit more vocal than they have in the past,” Bloomquist challenged. “They understand that they’re doing a great job so far this fall. Them and the guys that were here last year, Contrades, Jackson, McLain, have been here a couple of years now and understand what I expect. They’ve done a great job taking the reigns and showing some of the younger guys and the new guys that this is how we do it here.”
No matter who’s in the dugout and where they come from, the goal remains the same: to dogpile it on the mound as the last team standing at the College World Series come June.
“Last year didn’t end the way we wanted it to,” Bloomquist recalled. “You use that as motivation. Got plenty of motivation. There’s not gonna be a shortage of that around here…Gotta finish the job.”
“Everyone’s goal is to get in the tournament and go to Omaha,” Wallace added. “Take it as motivation.”
“Expectations don’t change,” Peraza included. “We gotta win. What happened last year, when you got off to a good start and didn’t finish as well as we liked to, we hope it’s different this year.”
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