Despite Loss, Vanderbilt Set Up Well For Decisive Game In CWS Finals

Image credit: Vanderbilt RHP Kumar Rocker (Photo by Peter Aiken/Getty)

OMAHA—On Tuesday, Mississippi State evened the College World Series finals series with Vanderbilt with a 13-2 win. 

This was always going to be the most questionable game for Vanderbilt from a pitching standpoint. Game 1 was mapped out nicely with Jack Leiter ready to go, and he delivered with six strong innings in a Commodores win. 

Making it even better, Vanderbilt was only forced to use one reliever to finish it off, as Nick Maldonado came on and threw three scoreless frames on 46 pitches, a not unreasonable number. 

Tuesday was a different story, however. With Kumar Rocker having thrown Friday, he wasn’t available. That left the assignment to freshman righthander Christian Little, who pitched in the Commodores’ elimination game against Stanford earlier in the CWS. 

Little is a highly regarded pitcher who reclassified in high school to get to Vanderbilt a semester early. He has good stuff, he’s an intense competitor and there’s every reason to believe he’s going to be a very important piece of the puzzle for Vanderbilt at some point, but he struggled on Tuesday. In two innings, he gave up three hits and five runs (four earned) with four walks and two strikeouts. He threw 58 pitches, just 27 of them for strikes. 

There was also some bad luck while he was in the game. In the first inning, with two outs, he got a soft grounder off the bat of Kamren James, but an error by Jayson Gonzalez allowed James to reach and he later scored. In the third, a rally started when a ground ball to Carter Young at shortstop got stuck in his glove. But no matter how you look at it, Little didn’t get as deep into the game as Vanderbilt would have liked. 

Struggling to throw strikes and allowing free base runners was not just limited to Little, however. Righthander Patrick Reilly came on in relief and walked four in one inning of work and had two wild pitches. Later, lefthander Hunter Owen walked two, hit two others and uncorked a wild pitch of his own. In total, there were 10 walks issued, two hit batters and four wild pitches for Vanderbilt pitching. 

“Yeah, we just needed to eat some innings some way, somehow,” Vanderbilt coach Tim Corbin said. “Tough sledding for those guys. They’re all freshmen, first-year guys.”

Throughout the season, it’s felt almost inevitable that if Vanderbilt was going to be in position to win a national title, it was going to come down to whether Rocker and Leiter, in some order, would be enough. 

Both have been so good this season, and more often than not, they’ve performed in a way that has allowed Vanderbilt to win just about every series. Third games, however, have been a different story, and as Corbin and his staff shuffled things around during the season to find the right combination of arms to use in those situations, that’s when they’ve been the most vulnerable. It just so happens this time that the metaphorical third game comes in the middle game of the CWS finals. 

But that’s the good news for Vanderbilt. Its pitching plan is set about as well as it could be for game 3. Before the series got going, Corbin said that he was confident that Rocker would be ready to go in a third game on four days rest. 

Because Tuesday’s game also got out of hand relatively quickly, the Commodores were able to piece it together without having to use any of the bullpen arms that they would prefer to use in big spots. Reilly, Owen, lefthander Nelson Berkwich and righthander Donye Evans are all pitchers who haven’t seen a lot of innings of late. 

That leaves the most accomplished of relievers ready to go. Righthander Luke Murphy, who has thrown 6.1 scoreless innings in the CWS, last threw Friday. Righthander Chris McElvain, he of 4.1 scoreless frames in Omaha, also last threw Friday. Maldonado did throw 46 pitches Monday, but that’s not likely to be enough to preclude him from being available for at least a few batters Wednesday. 

“We’ve got able bodies tomorrow,” Corbin said. “Whether it’s Nick or anyone else, we just try to—once we wake up, once the kids start moving around a little bit, start moving their arm, we’ll kind of determine what we need to do.”

All of that is good news, but the best news for Vanderbilt is the likelihood that it gets the elimination game version of Kumar Rocker on Wednesday, because that version of an already tough pitcher to hit is nearly untouchable. 

In three previous elimination games in his postseason career, he’s 3-0 with a 0.84 ERA and 41 strikeouts in 21.1 innings. 

Individually, that run includes his 19-strikeout no-hitter against Duke in the 2019 Nashville Super Regional, his 6.1 innings of five-hit, one-run baseball against Michigan in the CWS finals in 2019 and his start Friday against North Carolina State, when he gave up five hits and one run with 11 strikeouts in six innings. 

“He’ll compete,” Corbin said. “Give him the ball, he’ll compete.”

A deciding game for all the marbles is certainly not a new thing for Vanderbilt as a program, even if it is new to many of these players. Each time the team has been in the CWS finals, the series has gone to three games. It happened in 2014 and 2015 against Virginia, with Vanderbilt coming out on top in the latter instance, and it was the case against Michigan in 2019. 

Just as it did in 2014 and 2019 on the way to national titles, Vanderbilt will have to move on quickly to bounce back from a loss.

“Just gotta have a short memory,” catcher C.J. Rodriguez said. “I think we need to wash it out as fast as we can and get it done tomorrow.”