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O’Gara: Tennessee might’ve just made Texas A&M forever regret not bringing in Evan Aschenbeck to clinch a title
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Hindsight is 20-20, and 0-for-16 is 0-for-16.
In the top of the 7th inning, Texas A&M was single-digit outs away from winning its first college baseball national championship in program history. In Game 2 of the College World Series final, it held tight to a 1-0 lead with 1 on and 2 outs in the top of the 7th inning. To that point, Tennessee’s loudest offensive moment was when Christian Moore shouted obscenities at Texas A&M reliever Chris Cortez after a walk. The Vols weren’t just scoreless. They were hitless — 0-for-16 — with runners on base.
The night before, Jim Schlossnagle used his 1-for-1 trump card to preserve the 4-run A&M lead. That is, Evan Aschenbeck, AKA the nation’s top reliever who owned the nation’s top ERA having allowed just 1 earned run in his previous 8 appearances. Aschenbeck did what he’s been doing all year. That is, miss bats. Of those final 8 outs that he recorded to preserve the Game 1 win for A&M, 7 of them were strikeouts.
Roughly 19 hours later, however, Schlossnagle didn’t turn to the ace reliever in the 7th. Ultimately, the Aggies paid the price for that.
A go-ahead 2-run Dylan Dreiling home run turned that 0-for-16 number into a distant memory. A 2-run no-doubter from Vols catcher Cal Stark — who was 0-for-16 in the CWS to that point — in the 8th inning gave Tennessee enough breathing room to close out the 4-1 victory and force a do-or-die Game 3 on Monday night.
That Aschenbeck decision (or non-decision) might’ve decided a national title. Or it might not. To be determined on that.
For now, all we know is that Tennessee finally broke through with Aschenbeck nowhere near the mound.
We’ll play the results on that. If A&M loses on Monday night, that decision will live in Aggie infamy. If A&M wins, that decision will be praised because Schlossnagle played the long game. That’s reality.
Some will say that Aschenbeck shouldn’t have been an option for Schlossnagle at all because he threw 46 high-leverage pitches the previous night. But this is someone who had consecutive appearances 5 times during his All-American season. That included the Super Regional when Schlossnagle turned to him to get the final 9 outs of the Super Regional against Oregon. Mind you, that was a day removed from 1 2/3 innings to close out Game 1 against the Ducks. It’s also worth mentioning that the latter half of that back-to-back was his lone appearance in which he surrendered an earned run in the last 8 outings.
Maybe all of that factored into Schlossnagle’s mindset. Maybe it didn’t.
On a day in that he knew was going to be bullpen-heavy — the plan was to start Zane Badmaev and get an inning or 2 — he was fortunate enough not to have to make a ton of pitching decisions. Cortez deserved credit for that. His 101 MPH fastball and devastating slider kept Tennessee hitters off-balanced for 4 1/3 innings of scoreless work before he left the game with dehydration issues.
It’s A&M reliever Kaiden Wilson who’ll be on the wrong end of that “what if” if A&M loses on Monday night. He surrendered both Tennessee home runs, which allowed the Vols to complete their Division-I leading 30th comeback win of the season.
Sure, Schlossnagle had to trust the non-Aschenbeck members of that A&M staff. So far, that’s been ideal. Two earned runs allowed by the starting pitchers in Omaha were what allowed the Aggies to avoid playing from behind at any point in the CWS.
That is, until Dreiling delivered the biggest home run in Tennessee history.
That’s saying something for a program that hit more long balls than any Division I program in the 21st century. But it’s hard to argue with that. Again, the Vols were down to single-digit outs to watch a national championship opportunity slip away after reaching the CWS final for the first time in 73 years. That 0-for-16 number was staring them in the face. If Tennessee wins on Monday night, that blast will be the start of the championship DVD (or maybe just a 7-minute montage for social media is the thing they do now).
The point is, the Aschenbeck decision deserves to be dissected. A national title is on the line. If Kaeden Kent switched batting gloves after his scorching-hot run in Omaha, we’d dissect that, too.
The troubling thought for the “Schloss was saving Aschenbeck for Game 3” crowd is obvious. What if A&M isn’t fortunate enough to have a late-inning lead against the Vols for the third consecutive day? What if a team that has been just finding ways to win low-scoring games after its rash of injuries faces a Game 3 deficit after a fast start from the normally potent Tennessee bats?
Schlossnagle won’t make decisions based on hypotheticals. Those are for the rest of us. He can point to his team’s No. 3 ERA in Division I and say that wasn’t just the result of 1 pitcher. The rest of us can point to the decision to turn to a freshman with 1 appearance in the last month and say that wasn’t the right move to try and clinch a national title, even if Aschenbeck was only at 80% of his best self.
After A&M’s first loss of the postseason on Sunday, Schlossnagle said that Aschenbeck and Josh Stewart had an extra day of rest. The Aggies manager admitted that his star reliever was on his mind after the Dreiling blast flipped the game in the 7th, but that he thought it was “a big ask to get 7 outs after last night.”
Jim Schlossnagle: “Evan (Aschenbeck) was on my mind when Dreiling hit the homer. I thought it was a big ask to get seven outs after last night.”
“We are going into the last game of the season, and Lamkin is ready to roll. (Josh) Stewart had a day, and Evan had a day.”
— TexAgs (@TexAgs) June 23, 2024
Any championship run takes some gambles and perhaps a bit of luck. So far, Schlossnagle pushed the right buttons to get the Aggies within 1 win of history.
Hindsight won’t help or hurt the Aggies on Monday. The same goes for Tennessee, who might just be the inevitable force that got the shot of life it needed with Aschenbeck getting a day of rest. Alternatively, A&M could get the best version of Aschenbeck to close out a title.
Schlossnagle had better hope it’s the latter.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
