Real Champ1ons

One. Remember that.

That’s the number of teams who have won a College World Series title after losing two games. That’s also the number of true North teams that have won the title in the last 40 years. That’s the number of fingers held up by players and fans at the end of the game.

Dramatic? Maybe. But the truth remains.

The Beavers are the best team in the nation, and have the one piece of hardware to prove it. And they earned it. After the Beavers lost the opening game in Omaha they needed to dig deep. And they did. They ran the table to get to the College World Series Championship Series.

Gritting out four wins to get into the championship series where most people thought they would run out of gas. Including me. But the team stayed strong. Running on heart, guts, adrenaline, PowerAde, and any other type of amino acids or electrolytes they could get their fingers around.

They won the series in dramatic fashion. Playing off the youth and inexperience of a North Carolina team dominated by freshmen and sophomores. While the Beavers used their experience to go the series with only one error, the Tar Heels committed countless errors which led to many Beaver scores.

The winning run in the final game even came on an errant overthrow to first base which allowed Bill Rowe to score from second. The pitching staff for the Beavers is what really surprised a lot of people. The poise of the starting rotation was uncanny. They had the responsibility to go up against two first-round picks.

Jonah Nickerson, for example, put this team on his back and carried them to the championship. The man threw 323 pitches in the span of six days and never once had a hint of stress or fatigue on his face. I think that serotonin samples should be taken from Nickerson upon his return to Corvallis. I have never seen a player look so calm in such a high-stress environment. He makes John Olerud look like Jim Carey. He isn’t the only pitcher that deserves some love. The bullpen was alive and well in this series.

Props to Kevin Gunderson. Not only did he stop the bleeding in Sunday’s four-inning debacle but he got the win by pitching 5 and 1/3 innings of near flawless baseball. Then he came back the following day and secured a nations best 20th save by holding on to the victory and giving the Beavers baseball program its first national title.

And don’t overlook the bats. They posted 11 runs, which is one of the highest run totals this year in the college world series. The line-up had 29 hits in three games which led to 17 runs against possibly the nation’s best pitching staff. Darwin Barney used some of that NickelBlock juice to go 6-12 in the series with a pair of stolen bases and clutch hits galore.

Bill Rowe will live in infamy with his home run off of Danford during a seven-run 4th inning that secured the second game win. The ultimate praise goes to Pat Casey. He produced All-Americans, Pac-10 players of the year, and ultimately the best team in the nation. All with players from the Northwest, this proves that you can win without recruiting around the nation.

This is the one team that doesn’t need national recruits to in a championship. This is the number one team in the nation, with nothing left to prove. And maybe now, they’ll finally get the respect they deserve.