If Michigan wins the national championship, it would be the ninth different team to win the title in the past nine years.
2011 South Carolina
2012 Arizona
2013 UCLA
2014 Vanderbilt
2015 Virginia
2016 Coastal Carolina
2017 Florida
2018 Oregon State
If the Wolverines capture the title, it would be their third. UM also won in 1953 and 1962. There are only nine schools that have won the College World Series three or more times.
Non-national seeds are now 15-2 against Top-8 national seeds in CWS championship series games and have won all seven of the previous best-of-three series.
Eleven of 16 teams to win the first game of the championship series have gone on to win the national championship. Three of the past four national champions lost their first game of the championship series.
Through 13 CWS games, teams have a batting average of .240. Michigan leads with a batting average of .299. Vanderbilt is sixth at .218. The Wolverines have scored 29 runs in four games, the top mark in this year’s CWS. The Commodores are second with 16 runs.
This year’s average CWS attendance through 13 games is 22,079, on pace to average 20,000 or more for the 24th straight year. The total of 287,030 means the CWS had gone over 100,000 for the 39th straight year and over 200,000 for the 17th consecutive year.
Michigan has been on the road for more than a month. Its last home game was May 12, a 6-5 win over Indiana in 11 innings.
The Wolverines then lost at Kentucky before dropping two of three at Nebraska. UM lost 2-1 to Ohio State in the first round of the and trailed Illinois 4-3 heading into the bottom of the ninth. Miles Lewis had a one-out single, went to second on a failed pickoff attempt and moved to third on a groundout. Ako Thomas drew a walk before Jordan Nwogu had a two-run double to left center to win it for the Wolverines.
When asked about his team’s spirit and energy, UM head coach Erik Bakich explained it this way:
“It started a month ago,” Bakich said. “That realization of when we play not to lose, we lose. When we play loose and we compete as best we can and be aggressive and shift the target from being tight and squeezing it and thinking ahead instead of just shrinking the moment and just immersing themselves with one another, I think it all gets down to the perspective that they gained when they were staring at their season being over right in the face, one strike away from not having any postseason, and the perspective they got is they got another day together.
“So it’s been one more game at a time, one more day with each other. They’ve celebrated each day of the postseason like it’s been a gift because it was a reality. We were done. If we don’t come back and beat Illinois and go 0-2 in the Big Ten Tournament, the season is over.
“In fact, if we don’t beat Maryland the next day, the season is still probably over. If we don’t beat Nebraska in Game 1 of the double-header, the season might be over. Every win that we got was critical. We were one of the last four teams in. So that told you that we needed all 41 of those wins to make a run through the losers’ brackets of the Big Ten tournament.
“Once we were in, the guys already had that feeling. It
was already like — what started as relief in the walk-off win against Illinois
turned into that light bulb of what are we doing? Why are we playing this way? We
needed that moment to happen organically because we haven’t navigated our way
through the postseason before, so it’s not like we could rely on experience.
But now that we’ve done this, it sure feels right, and it feels exactly what
you want in order to make this type of run, this is the feeling that I would
think these teams have. We just want to hang on to it as long as we can.”