Tigers Overcome Delays, Beat FSU For ACC Title

DURHAM, N.C.—During the third of three lengthy rain delays on an arduous, zany, morale-testing championship Sunday, Clemson coach Monte Lee poked his head into his locker room.

Lee expected to see his Tigers with their heads down, on their cell phones. He expected them to be tight after just allowing eight runs in one inning to a Florida State team that had once trailed by 17. He expected them to perhaps be drained after rain forced them into their dugout for the third time in one day; a game that had begun at 11:02 a.m. and had stretched into the early hours of the evening.

But Lee didn’t see any of that. Instead, he saw his junior catcher Chris Okey—the undisputed leader of his ball club—taking his teammates’ cell phones away and engaging them in a clubhouse activity. The game of choice, called “mafia,” involves everyone in the locker room, a role-playing game with summer camp origins that often produces laughter-provoking situations. It’s a game the Tigers play often on long bus rides. Lee saw all of this, and he walked away. He knew his team would be just fine.

When play finally resumed in the ninth inning at 7:10 p.m.—eight hours after first pitch—the Tigers took the field with a looseness, a sense of self-assurance. Just 11 minutes later, those Tigers won an ACC Baseball Championship.

After a quick top of the ninth, Clemson lefthander Pat Krall threw a painless, scoreless bottom frame, putting the finishing touches on an 18-13 championship victory against Florida State. The Tigers dog-piled in the center of the diamond. The fun and games resumed.

“I didn’t need to do anything,” Lee said of motivating his club. “We preached to our guys—I’ve preached to this team—that if we want to achieve great things, the leaders on this team have to police themselves . . . and Chris Okey did that.

“And when the team came back out, they were laughing and they were loose and they were ready to go, and they were confident.”

Lee’s laissez-faire approach to coaching the Tigers extends well beyond locker room activities. The first-year Clemson head coach has said on more than one occasion that he doesn’t believe in taking over a new team and forcing in his “own guys.” Coaching in the shadow of 22-year Clemson head coach Jack Leggett, Lee said he doesn’t look any differently at the players another man recruited.

“I try to do the opposite,” Lee said. “I try to embrace these guys. That’s been our message since day one: I’m the head coach here, and you’re my players. I’m going to embrace you and do everything I can do to serve, to make you the best players I can make you and hope you have a great experience, and that’s what I’ve tried to do.”

Sometimes that means letting a team veteran such as Okey do what he feels is necessary to relax his teammates. Other times, from a pure baseball perspective, it means giving someone a chance who might not normally get one.

Case in point: Mike Triller, a fifth-year senior on the Tigers, has played sparingly throughout his Clemson career. Heading into the ACC tournament, he had only tallied 26 at-bats this season—and only four hits. Going on a gut feel, Lee started Triller in three games of the tournament—including the championship game—and the senior responded by winning tournament MVP, going 6-for-13, hitting two home runs and driving in four runs.

“My swing had been feeling good,” Triller said of what led to his sudden emergence. “I was having some good rounds of BP. I started getting a little more consistent. (Lee) gave me a couple of chances up in Notre Dame to pinch-hit, and I had some hits, was making good contact and having good quality at-bats. And he was just able to get me in the lineup this week, and I’m thankful I was able to contribute.”

Triller went 3-for-6 Sunday, right in the thick of a 15-hit, 18-run barrage. Starting with a double-turned-three-run-little-league home run by Okey, the Tigers took advantage of four Florida State errors in the first two innings—with a small weather delay wedged in between—to jump out to an 8-1 lead. They tacked on another five runs in the third—before a much longer two-hour, 54-minute delay—then emerged from that delay with five more runs in the fourth to build a commanding 18-1 lead.

But to Florida State’s credit, the Seminoles never folded. They faced the same painstaking delays Clemson did and had a reason to give in—down by 17—but they kept applying pressure. They finally got to Clemson starter Brooks Crawford in the fourth, tagging him for four runs with home runs from pinch-hitter Tyler Holton and Dylan Busby. And in the bottom of the eighth, the Seminoles went on a barrage of their own, scoring eight runs. Two came on Busby’s second homer of the game and fourth of the tournament—he likely would’ve been MVP if FSU had won.

“I can’t say enough about our baseball team, the way that we fought,” head coach Mike Martin said. “Having had the pleasure of working at this job for a few years, I don’t think I’ve ever been behind 18-1. But I also don’t think I’ve ever had a club that refused to throw the towel in and fought and scored 12 runs and just would not give up. And that’s, to me, what keeps us all going in this profession is seeing young men battle.”

Immediately after that eight-run inning the skies opened again and lightning struck, and both teams had to sit through yet another delay—this one one hour and 54 minutes. Suddenly, though, the complexion of the game had radically changed. What had been a laugher for Clemson quickly turned gravely serious.

That’s when Okey came in. He made sure the Tigers got back to laughing.

“I took (my teammates’) phones out, and then they got all pissed off a little bit,” Okey said. “I said, ‘let’s play a game, help us smile a little more.’

“(I) got them out there, got them loose and we just won the ACC championship.”

Sometimes it’s as simple as that.