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June 9, 2021

Best Off-Season Wishes from Our Love Shack to Yours

By TEDDY ALLEN/Designated Writers

Thanks to the baseball gods that, by some pennies-from-heaven quirk, Louisiana Tech’s Diamond Dogs got to play the final 16 games of its 2021 season in the cozy new J.C. Love Field at Pat Patterson Park, the last 10 in a “Non-Mask-Mandated Free At Last Free At Last Thank God Almighty I’m Free At Last” Zone.

Huge.

True, they were a better team on the road, 16-6 for a .727 winning percentage compared to 25-14/.641 at home. (Tech was 1-0 at a neutral site—vs. Air Force at LSU to open the season—and 42-20 (.677) overall.) They like to call themselves Junkyard Dogs and they’ve earned that, developed a sort of “Us Against the World” mentality since the Ruston Tornado punched them down but not out two springs ago.

Can’t blame ’em.

But goodness, it’s scary to think of what we’d have missed if Tech hadn’t hosted the Conference-USA Tournament and then the NCAA Baseball Championships Ruston Regional. Has Tech Athletics’ storied history ever experienced a more fabulous back-to-back jack?

The Bulldogs were 9-7 in those final 16 games, but it feels like they were more like 12-4; seriously, I had to add it up again. A couple of those were only semi-pretend games with ODU before the tournament started, just to keep the wheels oiled between the regular- and post-seasons.

Maybe it felt like the ’Dogs won more than nine times because of both the enthusiasm level of fans and players and the unprecedented fact that more people had watched more Tech baseball live in Ruston the past two weeks than in that same amount of time ever before. Ever. Until last week during the Regional, the amount of times Tech baseball fans have arrived early for the opening of the Ticket Office to be in front of a line that would stretch from there to 30 yards at the corner of Tech Drive and West Alabama is never. Empty set. Egg.

You’re telling me a Tech baseball ticket was going for $164 last week on StubHub? Affirm.

What a beautiful thing.

No matter how you slice it, Louisiana Tech pulled off the CUSA Tournament and the Ruston Regional in a wildly successful way. Sold out crowds. Televised games. Fun teams. Good baseball.

Like getting the stadium built in time – a colossal effort and a blueprint of steady, egoless teamwork – getting the tournament and regional was another illustration of everyone pulling in the same direction, from the University President to the athletics administration and coaches, ticket takers, concessionaires, security … I’ve been contacted by more than one out-of-towner who asked me to pass along thanks and praise – and this just doesn’t always happen at hosted events, and I’ve been to a few.

“Everything was so efficient and seamless,” said Lyn Rollins, the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame broadcaster who called a few games during the league tournament. “Not only was everything blue-ribbon top-shelf, but it was the spirit of ‘Yeah, we can do that.’ There wasn’t any ‘maybe’ or ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ it was just all a can-do attitude. Just wonderful. Look, please thank everyone who busted their tails, and that had to be just about everybody I saw.”

Rob McLamb covers Ruston Regional champion N.C. State and posted a story solely in praise of Tech and Ruston, which included this: “What makes the program are the people, which is the base Louisiana Tech has to build from. When there is such warmth towards others, delight at successful moments, and respect for those who visit, a place like Ruston has strong appeal.”

And of course friends and fans at the games said everything from “Can you believe this?!” to “I never thought I’d see the day.” More than one baseball letterwinner from years ago talked to me with tears in their eyes.

Sports can really be something…

Of course the one group you can’t play the games without is the team, and good for the 2021 Bulldogs. Gosh they were frustratingly fun to watch in that you knew they were going to hit, but because the bullpen couldn’t get enough swings and misses, no lead was safe. The way they enjoyed the game and being together, the common experiences of the past two years that bonded them in a special way, all those things made it impossible not to root for them. The final 16 games, especially the past two weekends, it was almost as if Providence were giving these Junkyard Dogs a reward for their perseverance, two weeks of colors and sights and sounds in a new stadium they got to christen, finally.

Thank you, baseball.

Couple of things from that final game, N.C. State’s 14-7 win that would send them to Fayetteville to play No. 1 Arkansas this weekend, (one of three SEC teams Tech beat this year in The Love Shack).

+ The State crew from Carolina are some sturdy, healthy boys who don’t appear to miss many meals or skip many weight room dates. The Hogs might want to buckle their chin straps. Who knows?, but the Wolfpack is primed to give them all they want.

+ Tech centerfielder Parker Bates stepped to the plate in the top of the first (Tech was the designated visitor) and you could read his mind: “OK, I’m like what, 1-for-11 or 1-for-12 or something like that in this Regional? I’d better do something about right now since Hunter (Wells) just walked,” and then Boom!, that beautiful left-handed swing and a home run to right-center and Tech led 2-0.

+ Then Bates comes up in the third and again, it’s like a cartoon bubble is above his batting helmet telling you that, “OK. So this is a big game and I’ve got like just like maybe two hits this weekend so it might be cool to hit another home run so…” and then SWING and then another two-run homer, this one down the line in right to make it 4-0 and scoring Taylor Young ahead of him because of course Young had walked on a 3-2 pitch which he’s done exactly – hold on a sec, let me count – 57,000 times since his first T-ball game, which is impossible to draw a walk in – unless you’re Taylor Young.

+ Bates only tripled in the fifth, scoring Wells, who’d singled. 5-0 Tech, Bates with 5 RBI.

+ So about that Hunter Wells guy…Tech’s all-time leader in hits in a single season and in a career and in career triples went out in a blaze of titanium or metal or ionized ash or whatever it is in today’s bats: in the Regional, the joyful, switch-hitting, never-had-a-bad-day third baseman for the Bulldogs went 11-for-16 with four doubles, three homers, and one lonely little strikeout. Man locked in. Man meaning business. Shoot, on the Friday morning of the CUSA Tournament, with Tech’s game six hours away, Wells was in the indoor hitting facility, raking all by his lonesome except for country music stud Brad Paisley, keeping him company by singing to a girl about how they needed to get a little mud on the tires. Paisley can make a guitar sing; Wells can do the same thing with a baseball bat. So fun…

Could Tech have won the Regional? Sure. When you get to the Regional round, you figure the 32 teams seeded 1 or 2 have a chance to win the College World Series at odds somewhere between 1-to-5 and 1-to-10, depending on the team. Tech is the same as anyone else: unless you’ve obviously been the best team over the course of the season, you need a non-hero to become a hero, you need a couple of guys to get hot out of the pen if you haven’t had a true closer yet, you need the draw to be on your side. And even if you’re the best, you still need some good baseball favor.

It’s a baseball thing.

Last thing: went walking through The Love Shack for just a few minutes late Monday morning. Had Tech won Sunday, the Regional title game between State and Tech would have been just a couple hours away. Would have been something.

But there was no popcorn popping Monday, no music on the PA, no ticket lines outside. About 2,800 less people in the park than there was the day before. The season was over. And it probably ended as good as it could have. Maybe as it should have.

Tech has a solid baseball history, but since 1993 it’s been tough sledding. In 2016, the Bulldogs got some traction and played in the Starkville Regional. Since, you’ve had a 36-win season, a 39-win season, a 34-win season somersaulted by a tornado, a virus season, and then this memorable 42-win year that included a first-place finish in the C-USA West.

Or course, they didn’t win it until the final few innings of the regular season. Junkyard Dogs Style.

Think about it… Now college baseball is bigger than it’s ever been. Growing. Televised in the regular season. The league tournaments. The Regionals. Things are moving … And Tech has a gorgeous new stadium in an ideal spot, and a town that is beginning to understand the joy of Baseball Fever.

This is true and semi-sad: For Tech in 2021, the bats are racked, the balls bagged up, those beautiful Columbia Blue unis washed and folded. It’s over for now.

But the way 2021 ended gives you get the feeling that it’s just getting started.

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TEDDY ALLEN

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June 6, 2021

A PLACE TO RUN AND SPREAD ‘THE LOVE’

Ran originally in June 6, 2021 Sunday editions of Gannett newspapers

Even if you don’t read the sports page, you might enjoy this story anyway since it’s secretly much more about teamwork and persistence than it is about ball, more about setting your jaw and walking into the wind, overcoming long odds to have a chance at accomplishing something you’ll never forget, something much bigger than yourself.

And something that brings others joy, maybe even inspires.

For the first time in the program’s history, Louisiana Tech Baseball is hosting an NCAA Division I Championship Regional this weekend; the schedule depends on the weather and on who wins what in the four-team field of Tech, N.C. State, Alabama, and Rider, a private university from New Jersey, but the regional is supposed to end Sunday or Monday.

Deadlines being what they are, this is being typed Wednesday night before the tournament even begins Friday. To check on tickets—games are scheduled for 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. Sunday—try latechsports.com/tickets. If it was sunny Friday and Saturday in Ruston, at least one team and their ticket needs will have bolted by now.

But the bigger story is that the baseball team lost its stadium, the original J.C. Love Field, in April of 2019 to a tornado. Part of the concrete roof was up the road a few hundred yards by Mrs. Jan’s Chevron. The scoreboard fell into the outfield, the outfield wall was gone, the turf was torn. The team and staff were given an hour to get in, get their stuff, and get out of the condemned park that had been the program’s home since 1971 when it opened as the best ballpark in the state.

It was a heart-hurting goodbye.

They played the rest of the season on the road and at Ruston High, then last year’s season was cut short after 17 games because of the pandemic.

But six seniors, the coaches, the underclassmen, they toughed it out. And through monumental teamwork, the new ballpark was playable by February and is now complete. Last weekend’s CUSA league tournament on campus was a sign of what a difference a ballyard makes and maybe what a difference two years of being together with no locker room and no home park makes on a group of teammates.

In the new packed J.C. Love Field at Pat Patterson Park — “The Love Shack,” it’s called — in six games over five days, the home team scraped out four walk-off wins, two wins in extra innings, and three wins by one run—including two comeback wins over arch-rival Southern Miss Saturday to avoid elimination. In their last three games, they’ve come back from 8 down to win, they’ve scored four in the ninth to win, and they’ve had a home run to tie a game in the ninth.

It was fabulous and unpredictable and impossible — unless you saw it.

Sports today in such a big-money era has plenty of black-eye moments. But stories like this happen and remind you why you loved ball in the first place, how things can be, what a difference sports can make.

The old ballpark had no place for children to run. The new ballpark does. Remember the old Fair Grounds Field in Shreveport? There were plenty of places for children to play down the right field line picnic area and places to move between decks.

Little ones have to move around sometimes at games. In Tech’s new park, there’s a wide concourse around the whole infield and halfway down the lines. There’s room behind the tents down the right field line and a huge berm beyond the right field wall where kids were running all day Saturday while Tech duked it out with Southern Miss. When Tech first baseman Manny Garcia hit a home run there, a boy maybe aged 10 snatched it up and, for three solid minutes, just ran 20 yards this way and 20 yards back, over and over, the ball in his hand raised toward the sky as if thanking the baseball gods by saying, “See?! I got it!”

Tech’s players are young men in college playing a little boy’s game, and little boys and girls are watching and it makes a difference, what this team has done and what this park means. A friend and “baseball lifer” took her grandson Thomas, 5, to Saturday’s doubleheader, the first games he’s likely to remember “and I promise you,” she said, “he will not soon forget it.” This mix of ballpark and ball team, more than 3,000 fans, all those colors and sounds and ballpark smells, is likely why.

“He asked about every single player, their names, positions, everything…he studied every at bat and pitch like a pro,” she said, and then he spent the night with them and reenacted the end of the game over and over. Sunday he got back home and watched the championship game on TV, standing in front of the set with a big plastic bat on his shoulder. Thomas’ mom texted my friend that before the game, Thomas had taken a bath, slicked his hair straight back, then poofed it a little to look like Hunter Wells, Tech’s senior third baseman. “Hey mom,” he said, “this is what Hunter looks like except he wears a jersey and I don’t have nothin’ on.”

Two years ago, the Bulldogs didn’t have much of “nothin’ on” either, so Thomas looked more like a 2019 player than he knows. But just like Thomas did Sunday, the team suited up and grabbed a bat.

Can the Bulldogs win the Ruston Regional? It’s easy to root for people you know, and they’re very good with a special mix of talent and chemistry and, because of the circumstances of the past two years, shared experiences, so the hope is that yes, they can. But in a lot of ways, they already have.

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