(photo by Craig Jackson, @leftfieldlounge)
Opening Statements
Tim Corbin,
Vanderbilt head coach: We’re certainly thankful to be in Omaha
at this juncture right now. You build this up as a coach in hopes that it will
never disappoint, and it doesn’t. It’s just a fantastic experience because of
the stadium, the people, the experiences, the games, and just the relationships
that you have during this time.
Erik Bakich, Michigan head coach: We’re in uncharted waters
with our program. A month ago we were a strike away from our season being over.
When you’re staring down the possibility of going 0-2 in your own conference
tournament and not having any more games to play, the perspective that these
guys have gotten from that about being able to keep their friendships together
for another day, to keep their relationships going, just to continue the
season, that’s something that’s fueled all of them.
We needed an organic moment to happen on the field, and we got it with that
walk-off winner. It did wonders for our confidence. It was a light-bulb moment
to loosen up a little bit and have a little bit more fun with each other,
immerse ourselves in these moments. And I’ve heard all these guys talk over the
last few weeks of the postseason of just how grateful that they are to get a
couple more games together, and they’ve made of most of it. They’ve been
playing one game, one pitch at a time and truly enjoying themselves on the
baseball field.
We’re so appreciative to be here. Our program hasn’t been here since Jimmy’s
grandfather was at Michigan in
1962. We’re so appreciative of these moments.
Handling Emotions
Ethan Paul, VU:
Just treat it like any other game really. We’ve trained a lot. We’ve been
through experiences that have taught us a lot, and it’s just another game. You
can’t try and put too much weight on it. You’ve just got to go in and play
quality baseball. We’re playing a good opponent. Just play your best baseball
and hope things work out for us.
Michigan reaching CWS
Jimmy Kerr, UM: Starting
at the beginning of the fall, Coach Bakich imparts on us that you don’t have go
south to be an Omaha program. We’re
going to build one right here in Michigan.
Just the mindset that he gives to the team is that we’re not just playing for
Big Ten championships, we’re playing on a national level. And we just trust in
the program that he’s built, the guys he’s brought in. It’s allowed us to be
here right now.
UM pitching
Joe Donovan, UM
catcher: I just can’t speak enough about them and Coach Fetter. One thing
they do is they really do put a lot of trust in Coach Fetter and the work that
he puts in looking at opponents’ team and their offenses and how they go about
things, and they’re just really disciplined in how they go about it, and not
too many highs or too many lows. They just go at every single game and every
single bullpen and practice and PFP with the
same kind of intensity.
Northern school at CWS
Joe Donovan: That’s definitely one of the choices that I wanted to make when I decided Michigan was — to trust in the program and try to help bring Midwest baseball to where we all know it can be because so many good programs around the country really live and breathe with Midwest kids. It’s just been so much fun being able to wear a Midwest team across my chest and to play for such a great program. I know so many of the other guys just want to see it get back to that point and bring the Big Ten back to where it’s a great baseball conference, and it’s just been so much fun.
VU expectations
Ethan Paul: I
think I can speak for a lot of guys in high school that want to go to a program
like Michigan or Vanderbilt and
those expectations are there. But at the same time, you’re going in and trying
to just do what you can to provide for the team. We all had this goal to be at
this point, and there’s a lot of factors that go into it, but we don’t really
take it as a negative thing, we take it as a positive thing, and we’re playing
for a reason, we’re playing to play together for a purpose. It’s just something
that we take in stride and we have that goal as a team, so it kind of brings us
together.
Julian Infante: You look at those
expectations and you see, all right, we want to be better than that team. We
want to leave a legacy that’s different from all the other teams at Vanderbilt,
at Michigan, and you look into the past and you say, all right, how can we make
this program better, how can we influence the guys coming in, how can we show
that this team is different, the leaders on this team were different. That’s
what we’re doing. We’re looking into the past, we’re trying to make this program
better, and that’s really all we can say.
Third assistant and scholarship limit
Erik Bakich: I thought it was low-hanging fruit, an opportunity to really
elevate our game. Just like all the coaches out there, I was disappointed that
they didn’t pass. I think the growth of our sport should always be at the
forefront, by the people who care about it, and that was one way to grow our
sport.
I think scholarships are a real issue. But that was something that I thought
could very easily have been passed. I haven’t talked to all the athletic
directors that voted against it, but I’m sure they had their reasons, and
hopefully this will be something that in the future can be looked at and can be
considered and passed, because I do think having that coach, to be able to go
out and recruit, as a Northern program, where our fall — and this is all
Northern programs, our fall is pushed up because we’re fighting the weather, so
our fall ball starts earlier in September. And to be able to have your
recruiting coordinator and your volunteer coach or that assistant be able to go
out on the road and recruit and keep your pitching coach home to develop those
pitchers instead of the recruiting coordinator and the pitching coach always out,
that’s obviously a benefit.
But the experience and the opportunity for growth for that assistant coach, recruiting
and player development are two pillars of all programs. For those kids to
continue to grow as individuals and as coaches, they need those repetitions
recruiting. They need to go out and see players, evaluate players, build
relationships, expand their network, and put themselves in the best position to
get opportunities.
It can do so much for our game of bringing in quality people, allowing our
student-athletes to be maximized. Why we don’t count that guy, I don’t
understand why we don’t count him. I think we all agree having an additional
body would be great, but I think we all agree that having someone serve in a
volunteer capacity and not get paid doesn’t seem right, either. So I have a lot
of thoughts on it, but I do think it was something that could have and should
have been passed.
Tim Corbin: I’m 32 years old, I’m
married, I have a child, I leave the home at 7:30
every morning, I come back at 8:00, 9:00 at night. I do it Sunday through Sunday. I
don’t get paid. I don’t get compensated. My wife stays home with a baby, can’t
afford daycare. And God forbid he goes to daycare, gets sick, I don’t have benefits
so I can’t pay for that. Can’t get a ticket to a football game, can’t get a
ticket to a basketball game, can’t eat with a recruit. Why? I’m a volunteer. I
stay all year, I work, I’ve got to go off in the summer, work camps. Why? I can’t
recruit. I’m a volunteer. I make camp money, I come home, put stress on my
wife, can’t have another child. Costs money to have children; can’t do it. I’m
a volunteer.
It’s the most short-sighted-thinking aspect of our game that we’ve been a part
of. We lose good people to other jobs, other sports – softball, professional
baseball. They leave baseball because they can’t afford to stay in it. I’ve got
a volunteer on my right. Why that hasn’t been changed, why that hasn’t been
turned over in the last couple of years is really, really sinful. It’s
dehumanizing in so many different ways. It doesn’t open up opportunities. We’re
very white inside the sport. Erik and I have a collection of minorities, but
because we’re very white in the sport, we don’t open up opportunities for other
minorities. And I’m not talking about blacks, I’m not talking about Latins, I’m
talking about women, I’m talking about other people that have an opportunity to
potentially coach at this level, and you say, women in baseball? Women are in
the NFL, women are doing Major League Baseball on TV. We limit ourselves
greatly. And because of that, when you’ve got young people that aspire to go to
college and play a sport, they look at the people coaching it, and when they
don’t see people like them, then they shut down the sport, then they move to
another sport. I can’t believe we’ve done that to ourselves. I can’t believe
that we didn’t overturn that and say, we’ll revisit it in 2022. 2022? I don’t
know if I’ll be alive. We walk around and think that we’re going to be living
the next day. No, that should be adjusted immediately. It’s something that
needs to be done.
For a 21-year-old kid like Jake Mangum to speak up, says everything you want to
know. Student-athletes thinking about that position, thinking about that
position and someone that they work with every single day, someone who’s always
there, and you can’t compensate them or reward them with just simple medical
benefits, it’s baffling, and it’s sad. It needs to be adjusted quickly, without
question. We’re better than that.
Improbable runs to Omaha
Erik Bakich: We’ve
never been here before, so we don’t have the experience of knowing how to
navigate it. I’ve heard Coach Corbin say many times, “If you go once, you
go twice, just from your players knowing how to get there.” We don’t know
how to get here. We’ve never been.
And for us, it was that authentic moment that made us believe, that gave us the
mindset and the confidence that we can do this, and if we don’t have the full
spectrum, if we don’t have — playing not to lose, and we had a game and a half
lead in the standings of the regular season of the Big Ten, and we were playing
not to lose, and so we lost. We didn’t play well. To truly look at the
finalization of your season, and like Jimmy said, his career is over. And to
have the seniors feel the same way, if we don’t have that, then we don’t
understand what it’s like to play on the other end of that spectrum, to be
loose, to play with a belief system and a confidence like, you know, why can’t
we do this?
Once we got into the NCAA Tournament, there was no pressure. We weren’t playing
not to lose the Big Ten title, we were just playing to play. And so we had to
have that authentic moment on the field. It changed our mindset. It gave us
belief. It gave us confidence. But then again, it wasn’t smooth sailing. We had
some meltdowns along the way. And if we don’t blow that ninth-inning lead
against Creighton, if we don’t make five errors after the eighth inning and
walk 10 in Game 2 against UCLA, if we don’t have those repetitions of getting
knocked down, then we don’t have those opportunities of getting back up.
So this team is — they have had those moments where they’ve dealt with their
share of adversity along this ride, and it’s strengthened us. It’s built us up.
It has callused our mind in a way that there’s just a lot of belief right now,
and they’re playing with that looseness and enjoying each other and enjoying
the moment because they’ve seen how many times they’ve made the moment too big.
They’ve made the moment big in the ninth inning of the regional championship
because now we start thinking about a super regional, and same thing with a
trip to Omaha in Game 2.
All of those experiences have allowed us to be in this position where we’ve
been able to simplify, take away the external things, make it as — just about
baseball and just about staying loose and just about competing pitch to pitch
as we possibly can. But we’re not here unless the collection of all those
circumstances along the way took place because we certainly didn’t know the
path to getting here. This has just happened for us. And now that it has,
hopefully that has got our program over the hump, that we can navigate our way
here again at some point in the future.
Tim Corbin: In 2014 after we won it,
we got home that night and I had dinner with Erik and we talked about that
actually because there was a moment in 2014 where we were very similar to Michigan,
where we found our playing personality. And I don’t ever like the word
“hot” because I think hot means that you can play well just in
certain circumstances. I think sometimes teams, it takes them a while, 30, 40,
50 games to find their playing personality. In 2014 we did that. We did it
after the SEC tournament. We had spurts of
it, but we didn’t develop that consistency that you need in order to finish
something off until right about the same time Erik’s team did.
So I think there’s a lot of similarities that way, and you develop into an
elite team. And you might not have been an elite team in April, but you have
the parts and the components to be an elite team if you find yourself in
experiences that will allow you to do that, and we found ourselves in that
situation in 2014, and Erik’s team has certainly found that this year.
UM pitching coach Chris Fetter
Erik Bakich:
Well, Chris Fetter is — I’ll get into what makes him special, but just from a
teaching standpoint, he’s one of the most talented pitching coaches I’ve ever
seen, very similar to the guy that we had at Vanderbilt in Derek Johnson.
Chris Fetter has been offered multiple Major League positions. You know, it’s
one thing to be able to analyze Trackman and Rapsodo data and understand what
the ball is doing and be able to speak that language, but then to be able to
convert that language into something that can be easily communicated to our
players and understandable to our players, and then to be able to communicate
to them based on what the data shows, we think we can help you and make you a
better pitcher by these types of adjustments, and he is a master at that.
But what truly makes him special is his love for Michigan.
To think that in 153 years of this program, nobody has thrown more innings at
the University than Chris Fetter, that’s special. He’s got a tattoo on his arm
that says, “Those who stay.” He loves Michigan.
He bleeds Michigan, and our players
feed off of it.
So having him in our program, besides the teacher and the coach that he is, the
person that he is, his wife Jessica, them raising their family in Ann
Arbor with their new baby son Cole, he’s been a
Godsend to our program.
VU history & Erik Bakich
Tim Corbin: They’ve
heard about Erik long before this. We talk a lot about our history to the
players because I want them to understand where it was at the beginning so they
don’t take things for granted. So it’s certainly part of our foundation. Vanderbilt
is not Vanderbilt without Erik Bakich. When Vanderbilt was not an attractive
school to come to, there weren’t a lot of people going after the Vanderbilt
position when I did. There were about two others, three others, so it wasn’t
one of those schools that people saw as a desirable situation. But I think when
Coach Leggett hired me, he was trying to hire other head coaches, and then he
finally said, I’m just going to hire a person that I don’t know, and I think in
Erik’s case, I think I felt a lot of the same. I felt like he’s someone that
was like me. He just needed the opportunity, and he was not going to take no
for an answer in anything that he ever did. So he built a recruiting base that
stands today. But the David Prices, the Pedro Alvarezes, the David Maciases,
the Dominic de la Osas, the good players back then, those are because of him.
And because of that, it allowed other people like them to want to come to
Vanderbilt.
Challenges for northern schools
Erik Bakich: I
think, number one, we have a blueprint from — he said Vanderbilt would be the
skyscraper it is today because of him and his wife, and I was very fortunate to
be a part of that, and what I got from that is a blueprint of how to build
something that maybe hasn’t done it before, and what it takes to do that.
Applying that blueprint to a school that genuinely cares about the
student-athlete experience and has the resources to support the
student-athletes, those are two huge components. The fact that Michigan
has indoor facilities — they may not be perfect, but we have indoor
facilities. We’re not on a gymnasium floor. And for a lot of Midwestern and
Northern teams that don’t have facilities, I could see how it could be very
difficult to compete at a high level. But we are fortunate that we do.
But I think bigger than a lack of facilities, bigger than the weather is a
belief system. And just like Coach said, not taking no for an answer, not
allowing cold weather to be an excuse. We have these indoor facilities, but we
don’t like to use them very often. We go outside. If it’s above zero degrees,
we are outside. It might only be for 20 or 30 minutes, but it’s just a mindset
thing. We’re going outside. And our players know it, and our recruits know it,
and we don’t shy away from it. Yeah, it’s cold here, but it’s not going to keep
us from getting better. The draft has shown that, and the postseason has shown
that.
So I think more than anything, more than any focusing on what you don’t have,
focus on what you do have, and if you have a belief system that you’re going to
build something and your players are going to buy into that, that can overcome
a lot of deficiencies that you have.