Nineteen minutes into a wide-ranging chat with reporters on Tuesday afternoon, Arizona State baseball coach Tracy Smith was finally asked the question that has been lingering around his struggling program this season.
Did he think his job was safe? That ASU’s administration, from Vice President for University Athletics Ray Anderson on down, was still backing him in the midst of a second consecutive disappointing season?
His answer was an unequivocal “Yes”.
Smith said his job security is “not even a concern” as he prepares for the final stretch of his fourth season at the school, a season he doesn’t believe to be his last at ASU.
On Wednesday, Anderson offered Smith a vote of confidence: “I think Tracy, in the things that I’m looking for, is doing a fine job,” he told the Speak of the Devils Podcast. Though Anderson didn’t explicitly promise that Smith would return in 2019 – he said Smith and the baseball program would be evaluated at the end of the season – the athletic director didn’t sound much like a man on the verge of making a coaching change.
“I’m glad that Tracy is not losing any sleep and obsessing because he needs to just stay focused on continuing to try to advance the culture and the chemistry and the maturity and the experience of his squad. I think that’s what he’s doing,” Anderson added in the sit-down interview.
Though Smith and Anderson apparently aren’t slamming on the panic button, plenty of the program’s supporters are.
After suffering its first sub-30-win season in 55 years in 2017, ASU is in trouble once again this spring. On their current pace, the Sun Devils (14-22) would finish with fewer wins than last season’s dismal total of 23. ASU would need to win 16 of its final 19 games to avoid missing the 30-win plateau in back-to-back seasons for the first time in program history, dating back to 1959.
In the fourth year of his tenure, Smith is 108-100 and, barring an unforeseen miracle in the next month, will miss out on postseason play for the second consecutive season, something that hasn’t happened since Pat Murphy’s first two years on the job in the mid-1990s.
In many ways, these last two years will represent the most unsuccessful pair of seasons the program has ever witnessed. And with each loss, a growing faction of the disgruntled fan base is putting the blame on Smith’s shoulders and pleading for his job to be put in the crosshairs.
But both Anderson and Smith, despite the team’s .389 winning percentage, have identified areas of improvement this season beyond the team’s losing record; enough so to where Smith felt confident to insist his job is safe.
“We’re going to keep moving forward,” he said. “That’s exactly our plan and what we set out to do. It’s the process that we outlined four years ago and we’re going to continue to do that.”
IMPROVEMENTS IN STATS, NOT WINS
Baseball can be a fickle sport.
While ASU’s winning percentage has dropped from last season, the team has improved upon almost every significant statistic, compared to 2017, both at the plate and on the mound.
The team’s batting average is up from .270 to .283. The Sun Devils are hitting more home runs per game and slugging 31 points higher than they did a year ago. A -72 run difference from last campaign has been turned into a -21 this season.
ASU’s pitching staff’s ERA has dropped from 5.54 to 4.60, its WHIP from 1.72 to 1.46 and its opponents’ batting average from .296 to .261. After allowing over 6.3 runs per game last season, the Sun Devils are surrendering just 5.6 runs a game this year while also striking out almost two more hitters per nine innings than they did in 2017.
Though not world-beating numbers, the improved stats represent notable strides in the right direction. Yet, they haven’t translated into more wins. That’s the conundrum Smith has faced all season. His team hasn’t manufactured the victories needed to take him off the hot seat.
“I like some of the things we are seeing, there are some good stories with some of the individual performances but it has to come together as a team,” he said.
An inconsistent rotation of starting pitching (ASU has just 13 quality starts this year), puzzling defensive lapses (the team’s .963 fielding percentage is 219th in the country) and erratic situational hitting (ASU is hitting .251 with runners in scoring position) have all plagued the Sun Devils this season. They have yet to find a dependable set of bullpen arms on the back end and have relied almost exclusively on underclassmen in their lineup (junior Gage Canning and senior Taylor Lane are the only qualified upperclassmen hitters on ASU’s roster). And despite the better hitting numbers, ASU has only scored five runs per game, the same average as last year.
But Smith identified his team’s inability to close out games as its most problematic hitch. Collapses in the last six outs of games, in Smith’s opinion, have often undone otherwise promising performances.
“If you go back and look at our season up to this point, we’ve been in either in a position to win a lot of baseball games or in control of the baseball game, as witnessed on Saturday, and then not being able to get those last six outs,” he said.
The Saturday that Smith was referencing was the Sun Devils’ 11-6 loss in Palo Alto last weekend. In many ways, it was the perfect epitome of ASU’s season. Star freshman Spencer Torkelson hit two home runs – bringing his NCAA-leading total to 18 – and Sam Romero was largely untroubled through seven innings. Just those last six magical outs separated ASU from securing its best victory of the year.
But in the bottom of the eighth on Saturday, ASU allowed five hits, walked three batters and hit another, committed an error and watched a potential upset morph into another upsetting result instead. The implosion came to a crescendo when Stanford’s Andrew Daschbach jacked a go-ahead grand slam, plating four of the Cardinal’s nine runs in the inning with one swing.
There have been plenty of other examples of late-game collapses this season, too. Nine times this year, ASU has lost after being tied or in the lead in the final two innings of a game. Conversely, the Sun Devils have only rallied once from a deficit in the eighth inning or later to win.
Last year’s team lost just four times all season when either leading or tied in the eighth inning or later and thrice mounted comebacks in the final two frames.
As sophomore pitcher Alec Marsh put it: “It seems like the theme this year is, when we make a mistake, the avalanche comes.”
Close games have been another negative divergent this season. In 2017, ASU went 13-13 in games decided by two runs or fewer. This season, the team is 2-10 in such games.
Smith claimed ASU is two consistent bullpen pitchers away from being a top-15 team in the country. Torkelson thought the Sun Devils possessed more talent than the second-ranked Cardinal. Sophomore Carter Aldrete said the biggest obstacle left for his team is learning how to win.
They believe the potential is there. Smith is hopeful that with a little more seasoning, his young team’s progress on the stat sheet will translate to the win column.
“We’ll be in those games, I’ll promise you, we’ll be in a position to win those games,” said Smith, referencing both the immediate schedule and his outlook for future seasons. “Now, it’s just learning how to win and closing the door out there.”
DESPITE POOR RESULTS, MOOD IN THE CLUBHOUSE IS “NOTHING LIKE LAST YEAR”
A frustrating string of results hasn’t heavied the atmosphere in ASU’s clubhouse. Unlike last season, the camaraderie of the Sun Devils’ roster hasn’t been smashed by a wave of defeats. This year’s team chemistry might serve as the starkest contrast to 2017 when the locked room devolved into a toxic atmosphere.
“It feels nothing like last year,” said Marsh, who was a vocal critic of the discord among ASU’s players last year. “Nobody is super down. I think it’s just, once we get the taste of winning it will come around.”
Smith acknowledged the continued culture change too, noting that his team continues to prepare “the right way”. He said the clubhouse is as strong now as it was 22 losses ago.
“That’s why I know this stuff will turn,” he said.
The team’s youth, though proving to be an extra on-field obstacle, has helped sustain a positive vibe off of it. A significant chunk of ASU’s roster has only second-hand knowledge of last year’s conflicts. New bonds have help mend old scars.
“We are such good friends and we care about each other so much that we try to get the most out of everyone, every day,” Aldrete said. “We still come to the field in good moods. We’re not just hanging our heads every day. It is tough, don’t get me wrong. Losing is tough and you can see it is wearing and tearing on the team but we are just trying to make the most of every opportunity to get to play the game together.”
Added Marsh: “I’ve never seen it like this before. The culture is great, everybody loves each other. Nobody is really on each other as much. Tensions start to rise this part of the year because we are losing a lot and people get frustrated, which is understandable. It happens to everybody. I think with how young we are, once we figure out how to win, we’ll start winning a lot more. That’s all it takes right now.”
WHAT ANDERSON WILL BE EVALUATING
All these factors have weighed on Anderson, who will have to make a decision on Smith’s job this offseason for a second consecutive year. When explaining Smith’s return after last season, Anderson told azcentral.com that Smith had the program on the “correct trajectory” despite its 23-32 record. A year later, he acknowledged fans’ concern in the middle of another poor campaign.
“I know there’s a lot of angst out there about the baseball program, rightfully so,” he said to Speak of the Devils. “But we’ll do what we think is in the best interest for the long term.”
“We evaluate all of our teams, all of our coaches, all of our programs at the end of the season,” he added. “What you want to see is, given the circumstances, do you see signs of growth and advancement? That’s what we will determine in baseball like we determine in every sport.”
Anderson cited the team’s youth as a major contributing factor to its losing record and said the Sun Devils were suffering from growing pains this season. He thinks it has hampered the team in their late-game failures too.
“You are going to have a learning curve; you are going to have some struggles,” he said. “We see a young team with a lot of talent, struggling growing up. That’s just the way it is.”
Off the field, Smith has impressed Anderson with his ability to recruit. According to Perfect Game recruiting rankings, the Sun Devils have signed a top-12 national recruiting class in each of the last three years. In the MLB Draft though, only six Sun Devils have been selected in the past two years combined. Nine ASU players were picked by big league clubs in 2015 after Smith’s first season in charge.
“The process is you have to recruit. You have to develop. You have to be able to have conviction that it’s moving along,” Anderson said.
Other factors -- beyond wins and losses -- that Anderson said he will look at when evaluating Smith include team chemistry, growth, and culture. Smith figures to check each of those boxes. Some fans, however, have taken to social media to argue that Anderson fired former ASU’s football coach Todd Graham despite positive marks in those areas.
Anderson admitted on Wednesday that different sports are assessed differently.
“Each sport is judged on its own individual circumstances. They are not all the same. There are a lot of nuances to all of the sports,” he said. “You’re not going to panic in a sport like baseball when you’re all of a sudden not winning as dramatically or as quickly as everybody else externally thinks you should. We’ll want to see how we’re handling that going forward.”
In 2014 though, Anderson moved on from Smith’s predecessor, Tim Esmay, after far less failure. In his final two seasons in Tempe, Esmay – who guided ASU to the College World Series in his first year as coach in 2010 – won a combined 70 games and reached the postseason in both years, though ASU was eliminated in the first weekend each time.
Before Esmay’s de facto firing following the 2014 season, Anderson -- then just six months into his tenure as athletic director -- made strong comments about his expectations for the five-time national championship-winning program.
He told Arizona Sports 98.7 FM at the time: “The fact remains is that when you think and talk about college baseball, Arizona State is going to instantly come to mind as a top four or five program in the country no matter how long it’s been since we won a championship, and that’s just the way expectations are appropriately set. I mean, there’s no better place for college baseball than right here in Tempe, Arizona, so it’s a program that should be, very frankly, doing a lot better and winning more consistently. And that’s where we need to go.”
By the end of this season though, it appears likely Smith’s 2017 and 2018 teams will have accrued less than 50 combined wins and no postseason berths.
Though there have been marginal improvements over the course of the last year, ASU’s record is still floundering at a historically low level. If Anderson does part ways with Smith, it wouldn’t be hard for him to make an argument as to why.
“We are going to let all of that settle out,” Anderson said. “We will make an evaluation at the end of the year as to where we are.”
