Arizona State might in danger of letting another season slip away.
The Sun Devils dropped to three games below .500 for the first time all year on Wednesday night, a literal slip costing coach Tracy Smith’s team its seventh loss in nine games.
With the bases loaded in the top of the eighth inning on Tuesday, catcher Lyle Lin scrambled to get to a two-out dribbler in front of the plate. But as the sophomore shifted toward first, his right foot skidded across the infield grass, sending Lin helplessly to the ground as the game-winning run crossed home plate.
Not even Lin, one of ASU’s veteran bats and top producers, was immune to a fatal blunder. His untimely tumble was the latest in a growing catalog of late-game missteps and mess-ups that have left the Sun Devils outside the postseason conversation for now.
"That speaks to not learning how to win yet," Smith said, citing ASU’s troublesome 2-7 record in one-run games.
Not to be confused, the issues plaguing this spring’s team are benign compared to the fractured atmosphere that dogged ASU’s 2017 season, a campaign that finished with a shocking 23-32 record.
Yet, on April 4 of last year, those Sun Devils were 12-15, three games under .500 following a blowout loss to Arizona. A year later, their record is no better.
Smith tried to paint Wednesday’s near-miss as a sign of growth. Junior center fielder Gage Canning, for example, mashed his third home run of the season to center field. Freshman pitcher Brady Corrigan excelled in his second career start, meanwhile, allowing just two hits and a single unearned run in six innings.
"The guy that (pitched) the third through the sixth, that's what you're looking for in a Pac-12 starter," Smith said, referencing Corrigan's strong finish to the outing, retiring nine in a row at one point and 12 of his final 13 hitters.
Most importantly – and unlike the previous night’s ninth-inning meltdown – ASU avoided total catastrophe after the Titans took a late lead in the series finale. Reliever Connor Higgins forced a pop up in foul to end the eighth inning. Reliever Fitz Stadler worked around a leadoff double in the ninth to keep the deficit to just a single run.
"That thing could have gotten out of control in a couple spots there," Smith said. "I thought we did a good job [limiting the damage]."
Smith's young group didn’t fold in the face of adversity. They just couldn’t overcome it either.
The same could be said about their season thus far.
The overhaul of last year's roster left ASU very young this spring. Most nights, almost half of the lineup is comprised of freshmen (on Wednesday, four first-year players combined to go 3-for-13 from the plate). Eli Lingos is the only current starting pitcher to have previously played D-I baseball. He and Canning have been the only two consistently producing upperclassmen on the team.
Despite the youth, the Sun Devils fought through a tough non-conference schedule and opened their Pac-12 slate with a three-game sweep of Oregon at home last month, a series that boosted their record to 11-9. Their luck has turned ever since.
"I try to remind everybody, other teams give scholarships and they're trying to win too," Smith said, doing his best to pacify concerns from the recent dip in performance.
ASU's current situation and the inexperienced roster has altered Tracy Smith's evaluation methods.
"It's tough sometimes when you are evaluated on the wins and losses but you are trying to grow this team," he said.
In the midst of a three-week slump, Smith is looking for his team to "fail forward," as he put it.
"You’re looking with a young team: are you— we were talking earlier in concept — are you failing forward?" he said. "In other words, if you fail, are you learning from your mistakes? Are you getting a quality performance out of a freshman that hasn’t pitched a lot? Hey, that’s growth.”
"Every time that happens, it's going to help you in the long run," he added.
Often, the Sun Devils' fatal mistakes have been borne of immaturity, like when freshman first baseman Spencer Torkelson committed two errors in the five-run ninth inning on Tuesday. The more ASU "fails forward", the less those novice mistakes should occur and closer it inches toward becoming the Pac-12 and College World Series contender Smith believes the program should be.
"We got to keep operating them out there," Smith said. "That's how I look at it when (in) a slump and I have to believe that, we stay with it, these guys grow, that these one-run losses turn into one- and two-run victories."
Smith thinks that development is happening. Instead of a repeat of the second-half collapse that left his team well shy of the respectable 30-win mark last year, he feels a change of fortune and results is on the horizon.
"We want to be in the hunt for a national championship and we feel like we have the personnel to do that,” he said. “We just got to give them some seasoning, we have to give them some time."
