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Gonzaga University Athletics

John Blanchette: Zags keep fingers crossed in bid to host playoff games

By John Blanchette For The Spokesman-Review

Yes, it’s possible Gonzaga’s baseball team will play an NCAA tournament game in its own city before the basketball team ever fulfills that destiny. Go figure.

Better hope it’s more about body of work than one last eye test, however.

After winning the West Coast Conference championship and a place in the NCAA bracket in dominant fashion on Thursday night, the Bulldogs’ bats, arms and gloves were furloughed for the rest of the weekend by the San Diego Toreros, who were doing their damnedest to sneak into the postseason field themselves.

The Zags went 15 innings without a run and lost 9-0 and 10-2. The scorebook abbreviation for that is y-i-k-e-s.

Now, does this make them the first team ever to earn an automatic bid and still be on the bubble?

The NCAA names its 16 regional sites at 5:30 p.m. Sunday, and when Gonzaga made the list of 20 under consideration a couple weeks ago there was never a guarantee it would make the cut – or a suggestion it wouldn’t. No winks, no high signs. Just anticipation, imagination and scoreboard watching.

“It gets me fired up just to think about it,” said first baseman Andrew Orzel, “to hopefully do something that’s a first in Gonzaga history.”

Baseball history, he meant – probably.

Spokane has hosted NCAA basketball early rounds on five different occasions, but in none of those years was the Zags’ resume enough to merit a hometown advantage. That was going to change in 2020 – until COVID-19 changed 2020 for everyone.

Actually, Zags baseball did have an NCAA event here – 47 years ago – in the form of a play-in game for entrée into what was then a 28-team field. But an afternoon loser-out with Denver at old Pecarovich Field is a little different than four top 50 teams mixing it up for four days at the little jewel of Hertz Field.

And best of all, the Bulldogs played their way into this position.

The NCAA doles its regional sites almost exclusively to No. 1 seeds – not since 2010 has one had to go on the road – but it had to have some wiggle room this year to set up COVID testing. Still, you had to be 1A if not a pure No. 1 to make the short list, and at No. 21 in the RPI, that pretty much describes the Zags.

You wonder if they might be higher on that list if not for the two-week shutdown they had to endure for several positive tests.

The Zags had won 10 of 11 at the time; the USD series got rerouted to this weekend, but two games against Oregon and three with Seattle that could have enhanced their RPI were axed.

Suddenly, players like Orzel were limited to “a lot of jump rope and pushups” in their quarantine quarters.

“There’s no good time for it,” said Bulldogs coach Mark Machtolf, “but that was a bad time because we were playing our best baseball. And we’d played two other teams coming off COVID and they struggled – we no-hit Pepperdine right after they were on a pause.”

Instead, the Zags raked 18 hits for 12 runs against Portland in their first game back.

“Baseball – sometimes there’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to it,” Machtolf said.

He did credit “being able to squeeze in a couple scrimmages where we saw some live pitching against our best arms” for knocking off the rust – perhaps the first intrasquad games in history to qualify as a season’s turning point.

A more traditional one came on a March trip to Texas. After losing a couple of bitter 5-4 losses to powerful Texas Tech, the Bulldogs took two of three from TCU – now No. 5 in the RPI. The series was clinched in the 11th inning on a hard shot by Orzel that the Frogs misplayed into three Gonzaga runs.

“Things took off from there,” Orzel said.

Orzel is an untraditional Zag, a senior all the way from Delaware via Wofford, which offers no post-degree classes – making him a graduate transfer by necessity. Arriving last fall, he found some of the getting-to-know-you-aspects of joining a new team limited by COVID protocols. But he grasped that the core of his new team included several players – pitching ace Alek Jacob and hard-hitting Brett Harris among them – whose junior years, often the launching pad to pro baseball, had been wiped out by the virus, leaving them with something to prove.

“This got taken away from us last year,” Harris said after the championship clincher.

They’ll be disappointed if their pratfall on Friday and Saturday costs them a host’s role, even if a sweep wouldn’t necessarily have assured it.

“Hosting can help you two ways,” Machtolf said. “There’s this year – it seems like 80% of the teams who host move on. But just the attention matters. The next time you’re knocking on the door, it can count for something if they’re used to seeing your name.”

Seems there’s always another eye test to pass.