The best-of-three CWS championship series, which starts Sunday at 8 ET, isn't really known as the Ray Tanner Invitational yet. But Lopez, who won the national title in 1992 when coaching Pepperdine and also has twice taken Florida to the CWS and is in his second World Series with the Wildcats, knows how difficult it is to get this far and to do what Tanner and the Gamecocks have done the past three seasons.
South Carolina is trying for a third consecutive national title, something that hasn't been accomplished since Southern California won five in a row from 1970 to 1974, which was a completely different era.
But although South Carolina is 25-1 in its last 26 NCAA tournament games, the Gamecocks' route back to the championship series has not been easy this season. They lost five of their first six Southeastern Conference games in March and still had a losing league record as late as mid-April when they were 6-7.
Their record 22-game NCAA winning streak was broken in their second game of the College World Series against Arkansas, sending the Gamecocks to the losers' bracket. When a scheduled elimination game against Kent State was postponed Wednesday by rain, South Carolina had to keep its season alive by winning three elimination games in 36 hours Thursday and Friday, beating the Golden Flashes once and Razorbacks twice. In the last game against Arkansas, South Carolina trailed 2-0 before rallying for a 3-2 win.
The Gamecocks won those three contests with sterling pitching, surrendering three runs in 27 innings, and they'll likely need more of it if they're to knock off an Arizona team that's hitting .330 on the season and has seven regulars batting .324 or better.
"They're really good, and they've pitched well, too," Tanner said. "But they probably swing the bats better than anybody I've seen for a while. So it's going to be one of those deals that I don't know if we can slow them down.
"You hope to get a couple balls hit at us, and maybe a double-play ball or something. We're going to have to be as good as we've been. We've pitched really well to get back into this position. And we're going to have to have a couple of guys that haven't maybe been on the mound yet pitch really well."
But although the task is tall, senior pitching ace Michael Roth, who threw a two-hit shutout Thursday against Kent State, thinks the Gamecocks will be up to it. The team is hitting its stride with a blend of veterans who have won titles and some youngsters who now have gone through struggles to get to this spot.
"We have come a long way," Roth said. "We've grown as a team."
Roth's roommate, outfielder Adam Matthews, recalled that fans were "ready to jump off the boat," when the team started 1-5 in the conference. "But we weren't, and we were just continuing to try to gut it out and grind it out. And here we are."
Ironically, both teams have been housed in the same Omaha hotel for more than a week, and players have run into each other in elevators and the lobby. But since they were in opposite brackets of the CWS, they have not yet played each other.
Roth jokingly called the series the "Hilton Hotel Battle Royale."
But do the Gamecocks have an advantage because some of their players have played for and won the title before, while Arizona's players have not?
"We've been here, and we've had some good fortune here, (but) I don't think it's an advantage for us," Tanner said. "I hate to try to give you coach-speak, but we're probably the underdog. We've been through the losers' bracket. We've played a couple of extra games. And these guys are scoring 10 or 12 runs a game. They're just an offensive juggernaut. So we've got our work cut out for us.
"Maybe they have the advantage because of their offensive prowess. And so we'll see. We'll see if we can step up on the mound and keep things interesting."
The Ray Tanner Invitational is about to begin.
Source: http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/~r/UsatodaycomCollegeSports-TopStories/~3/CWKcLk5JWX4/1
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