Baseball is like all the other team sports, only more so. The compelling elements of team sport competition are more or less the same: belief in the successful collaboration between people endeavoring to accomplish an extremely difficult goal is deeply nourishing to the human spirit, even to those who are not immediately involved in the competition.
This goal is made all the more difficult to achieve due to a number of very familial pitfalls of the human experience: physiological limits to endurance, injury, illness, mental fatigue, adverse weather, bitchy coworkers, grinding travel, individual missteps and garden-variety bad luck.
There is a junior varsity-level word that is en vogue, “relatable,” that could be used to explain why team sport competition is so resonant with so many people. The better word is “identifiable.” We all identify with the cosmic slings and arrows that befall our sporting heroes, and yet they persevere. When they fail to persevere, they cease to be our heroes. It’s a simple arrangement.
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Baseball is not the only team sport that exhibits and celebrates all this human suffering and triumph. Hell, it’s not even limited to sport. There are people who walk amongst us who are emotionally invested in “reality” television competition.
But thinking people understand even ice hockey or lacrosse is vastly superior to, say, The Bachelor or America’s Got Talent or Jeopardy in terms of human merit. Not only merit from the competitors, but merit to be admired by those bearing witness. Team sport reliably produces the conditions to admire the best of what humanity has to offer and to best commiserate our inevitable failings.
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Baseball does this more than any other sport by virtue of playing more games, generally without shelter. Man’s frailty in the face of a vast and mysterious universe filled with detrimental weather, unfair outcomes and unreliable arbiters of justice is reflected unto us every time someone hollers, “Play ball!”
There is more hope and hurt in baseball because there are more days of competition, more opportunity for chaos and chance to aid or crush earnest striving, more examples of grown men absolutely losing their tempers in public. If team sport can generally be said to provide analgesic healing to the human soul, baseball offers the highest dosage. Boring and slow and archaic and riveting and breathtaking and perfect.
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Nevada baseball has forced us to reconsider hope. Hope is a tender thing, and we guard it with increasing restrictiveness as we age. We learn to disabuse ourselves of hoping our favorite team will win the league or advance to the postseason or make a run at a championship because we have hoped before and have had our tender hopes dashed.
Consider the New York Yankees, 27-time champions of Major League Baseball. Their championship hopes have been crushed at various intervals along the path toward glory every single season since their last World Series win in 2009. For example: a 5-year-old in 2009 who does not remember the last Yankees championship, who has subsequently become a Yankees fan, has endured 15 consecutive seasons of unfulfilled hope. Hope was most cruelly terminated for our hypothetical Yankees fan in this most recent World Series where the Yankees finally won their first League Championship since 2009 only to be steamrolled by a superior Dodgers side.
This is not an appeal for sympathy toward Yankees fans. They’ve had it better than anyone else. But that’s our point. Even Yankees fans, the people for whom the outcomes have been the best over the decades, hope and suffer.
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Nevada men’s basketball had all of us hoping for an extended weekend in Salt Lake City two Marchs ago in the NCAA Tournament, leading Dayton at halftime. Since that bitter defeat, hope has been in relatively short supply for those who love the Silver and Blue.
Football has found the right leader. But even with the Choate Boat providing needed emotional buoyancy, a star quarterback has departed and the program is still years, not months, removed from its last Mountain West victory. We hope Nevada football will be improved this fall, and we also anticipate this. But we guard our hope very tightly.
Men’s basketball’s most recent season provided a frustrating reminder about the power of hope and the tension one must eat when results do not match hope. We did not guard our hope nearly as tightly for men’s basketball this season, and the results were more painful because of it.
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Wolf Pack baseball’s recent run, however, has left us no choice. Hope is in the air and on the wind. After a stirring road series win at Air Force two weekends ago, Nevada’s sweep of Fresno State in Reno this past weekend was an audacious challenge to the remaining skeptics.
Fresno State came in as the first place team in the Mountain West and the defending champions. Nevada outclassed them in three straight affairs that could have broken either way. The permutations of baseball over the past three games could have easily provided Fresno State with its own series victory, if not a sweep.
Nevada benefited from three Bulldog errors resulting in two unearned runs scoring for the Pack en route to a 7-5 game one win. The Bulldogs came into the weekend with the best fielding percentage in the conference. Nevada holds that honor now.
Game two was even tighter. Nevada battled back trailing 5-3 in the sixth inning with two runs to pull even at 5-5. That tie held until the bottom of the ninth inning, when Sean Yamaguchi punished a baseball to such a degree you would have thought it owed him money. His solo home run clinched a 6-5 victory.
Game three couldn’t possibly top the first two, except it did. Nevada scored four in the bottom of the ninth inning to tie the game at eight and force extra innings. Jake Harvey drove in the winning run in the 10th to give Nevada a 9-8 win, a series sweep and now a three-way share of first place with six conference games remaining.
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Nevada’s five-game conference win streak includes the following comebacks:
* Rallying from a 14-4 fifth-inning deficit to win 17-15 at Air Force
* Rallying from a 5-3 sixth-inning deficit to win 6-5 in the bottom of the ninth versus Fresno State
* Rallying from an 8-4 ninth-inning deficit to win 9-8 in 10 innings versus Fresno State
One can journey through an entire season of college baseball and not collect two such results. Nevada has three in the past five conference games. We are left with no choice but to hope.
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What, then, are we hoping for Nevada baseball?
Mountain West baseball hope is tough. While the conference has put football teams into the national playoff (Boise State) and men’s basketball teams into the national final (San Diego State) in very recent memory, MW baseball has not put a team into the College World Series since TCU’s run to Omaha in 2010.
Nevada baseball last appeared in the NCAA Tournament in 2021. That was also its last MW regular-season title. Nevada has not played in the postseason since the 2022 Mountain West Tournament. Making an appearance in the conference tournament was the hope at the start of this season. Now, Nevada not only looks to be on target to return to the conference postseason, it is tantalizingly close to a MW crown.
We cannot know what the future holds for Pack baseball. We can hope for MW championship glory. We can recklessly dare to hope for a deep run in the conference tournament, with a bid to the NCAA Tournament awaiting the winner of that event. Dangerous stuff, no doubt.
But most importantly, we can hope this Wolf Pack baseball ride doesn’t end any time soon.
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The great Don Ian and I return to the stage this Thursday night at Belleville Wine Bar in downtown Reno. No cover charge. We hope to see you there.
John L. Ramey is the play-by-play voice of the Nevada Wolf Pack. You can listen to him broadcast Nevada football on 105.7 FM KOZZ, Nevada men’s basketball on 95.5 FM The Vibe and Nevada baseball on 630 AM FOX Sports. You can enjoy John’s writing at John Ramey Media. Follow him on Twitter @John_L_Ramey.
