Fitt: Get Ready For Goliath vs. Goliath

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The college baseball world will get a rare treat this week, when Arkansas faces off against Oregon State in the CWS Finals. Very seldom are the final two teams standing also the “best” two teams in college baseball; as coaches always say, it’s typically the hottest team that wins it all, not the best. After all, the No. 1 national seed still hasn’t won the national title since 1999, the first year of the 64-team era.

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Arkansas didn’t have quite as much regular-season success as those teams, heading into the NCAA tournament with a 39-18 mark, but the Hogs proved themselves repeatedly against elite competition, and they passed the proverbial “eye test” with flying colors all season long. I saw the Hogs go 1-2 at the Tony Gwynn Classic back in Week Two; they played poorly that weekend, especially on defense, and still my overall impression of the Hogs was, “Wow, are these guys going to be good.”

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Kendall Rogers was similarly bullish on Arkansas after watching them demolish a very talented Kentucky team in a three-game sweep a few weekends later. He picked the Hogs to win it all heading into the NCAA tournament and the CWS.

I bring these things up not to boast — anybody who watched these teams for a weekend this year probably came to the same conclusions about their incredible talent. I bring them up because it reinforces the point that these two Finalists are exceptionally talented teams, with two of the most dynamic, balanced and versatile offenses in recent CWS history. This matchup is really special, and we don’t get Finals like this very often.

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“I mean, our program, when we got here in ’04, it just took off. We started getting the guys, we started getting guys out of Oklahoma and Missouri and Texas,” Van Horn said. “And obviously the kids out of the state of Arkansas. And we were pretty good when we were here in ’09. We had Dallas Keuchel and Drew Smyly, who was just starting to pitch, and a couple of other big leaguers on that team, and at that time we didn’t know what type of careers they would have. Looking back, it’s like Pat said, it’s so rewarding to see what your players are doing. And then ’12 we were good, we just couldn’t hit. We could really pitch. We were one game away from getting to the championship series. We lost two tight games, one-run game and two-run game to South Carolina. Then in ’15, we just managed to get here.

“And then this year we felt like it was different.”

It is different. This time, Arkansas is a Goliath. Oregon State has been a Goliath for two years, but this time it broke through to the Finals, after getting its heart broken last year with back-to-back losses to LSU in the bracket finals.

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