Rocky Top-pled: Notre Dame takes down No. 1 Vols to advance to CWS
Overcome with emotion last fall while addressing a Notre Dame baseball team he felt was teeming with potential, former Irish coach Paul Mainieri made a promise to the 2022 ND team.
He told them he would be in Omaha rooting them on WHEN — not if — the Irish reached college baseball’s Mecca for the third time in school history, in June.
Twenty years after Mainieri took his own Irish team to the College World Series by upending a No. 1 team in the Super Regional round, current coach Link Jarrett’s Notre Dame team pulled perhaps an even bigger shocker.
Freshman Jack Findlay pitched five dominant innings of relief against the brashest, bruisingest, burliest lineup in all of college baseball and catcher David LaManna found a power surge no one knew he had to help the Irish rally past No. 1 Tennessee, 7-3, on Sunday in the deciding Game 3 of the Knoxville Super Regional.
Notre Dame (40-15) will open play in the eight-team, double-elimination CWS Friday in Omaha, Neb., against the survivor of Sunday’s weather-delayed game 3 matchup between No. 9 seed Texas (45-20) and No. 8 seed East Carolina (46-19). Game times will announced after 7 p.m. EDT on Monday.
“The poise, the toughness of this group. We've never seen anything like it,” said Notre Dame coach Link Jarrett, his Irish 52-21 away from home during his three years in South Bend. “We've battled and fought for years to get to this moment.
“The feeling of almost calmness and gratitude — I didn’t know how I would feel. I knew how I felt as a player three times (as an All-America shortstop at Florida State), but that calmness and feeling for them that THEY did it, I’ll never forget it. And we (still) have unfinished business.”
That would be a national title, something the 1957 and 2002 Notre Dame teams couldn’t reel in once the reached Omaha,
Also void of a national championship is every NCAA No. 1 seed since 2000, the year after the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams and instituted a Super Regional round. That includes a No. 1 Florida State team Notre Dame took out in three games in the Super Regional round in 2002.
The 1999 Miami Hurricanes are the only top seed in that format to go on to win the national title.
On Sunday, Tennessee (57-9) joined that group by losing for the first time in 50 games this season when leading after six innings. The Irish rallied for three runs in the seventh and three more in the eighth after falling behind 3-1 in the fifth inning.
The bottom of the fifth also happened to be when Findlay entered the game as the third Irish pitcher of the afternoon.
Game 1 winning pitcher and reliever Alex Rao got touched for a run-scoring double off the bat of Seth Stephenson for a 3-1 Vols lead and the most dangerous part of the Tennessee batting order coming up.
Cue more Rocky Top, the song played at Lindsey Nelson Stadium every time the Vols score a run. But Findlay replaced Rao, and promptly struck out Tennessee’s career home run leader, Luc Lipcius, who homered twice in one inning of the Vols 12-4 rout Saturday and off Irish starter Liam Simon in the first inning on Sunday.
Findlay walked Jordan Beck, but retired the next two Vols hitters to keep the game at 3-1.
“His fastball was moving and he was putting it where he wanted to,” Lipcius said of Findlay. “He was just keeping us off balance. Kudos to them. They have a really great staff, a great team and he was just on today. Whatever he was doing, it was working against us.”
And it kept working. In five innings on Sunday, Findlay allowed one hit and two walks while striking out four. In four postseason appearances, covering 10 ⅓ innings, Findlay (6-2) has allowed three hits, four walks and one earned run with 12 strikeouts in picking up three saves and a victory.
“I was surprised that Jack Findlay threw five innings and only gave up one hit against probably the best offensive team in the country,” said grad senior third baseman Jack Brannigan, one of the ND offensive heroes. "I’m just so impressed with the work that he did.
“I remember when he first came in, I was thinking, ‘OK who’s next?’ We'll get a couple of innings out of Findlay, and then who’s going to finish it? He just took it and ran with it, so I'm so impressed with him and just proud of the whole team.”
Notre Dame manufactured a run early. DH Jack Zyska beat out an infield single in the top of the second inning. He then stole second on the first pitch to LaManna, stole third on the second pitch to LaManna and came home on a LaManna groundout to tie the game at 1-1.
But Tennessee freshman righty starter Chase Burns found his rhythm and Notre Dame ran itself out of some innings with bad base-running decisions and imperfect slides. In fact, Burns had retired nine in a row after striking out Jared Miller to lead off the top of the seventh.
With the Irish trailing 3-1, Carter Putz hit a one-out, ground-rule double to left. Burns then got Zyska to pop up for the second out.
Up came LaManna, a 5-foot-10, 176-pound grad senior with one home run this season. He then muscled a Burns pitch for an opposite-field homer to right field, and suddenly the game was tied. And then suddenly it wasn’t.
Brannigan launched his 12th home run of the season, this one way beyond the left-field wall, and the Irish led 4-3 and Burns was out of the game.
“I’m just happy I don’t have to shave the mustache,” LaManna said of the good luck charm all the Notre Dame players (who are able) grew for the postseason.
They also introduced the concept of rally bananas when the Irish tacked on three more runs in the eighth against the nation’s leader in team ERA.
It brought more two-out magic, as Putz doubled home two runs and Zyska singled Putz home for a 7-3 Irish advantage.
“It’s a dream come true,” Brannigan said. “I remember when I first committed to Notre Dame and there were people who actually said to me that you better hope you win a ring in high school, because you’re never going to win one in college, and that’s just the kind of program that it was.
“I’m just so proud to be part of the team that rebuilt it. My roommate is Zack Prajzner, shortstop. He actually said to me this morning, ‘If we win this game, we’re going to be legends.’ That kind of stuck with me, and that last out was so special.”
Findlay pitched around his own fielding error in the eighth and a walk in the ninth to finish off the Vols — with a game-ending doujble play, no less — and leave them with all kinds of what-ifs.
“This is a job that requires big-boy decisions. They come at high stakes when you play in our league or get into the postseason,” said Tennessee coach Tony Vitello, whose Vols lost almost as many home games this weekend (2) than they did in 40 regular-season games at Lindsey Nelson Stadium (3) in 2022.
“A lot of that was discomfort from things we saw out of Notre Dame,” Vitello continued. “So again a credit to them. And then you’ve got to execute and they did that throughout the weekend.
“Notre Dame will get to go to Omaha and probably get to do some damage. That's a real tough group. For us, they say that time heals all wounds. I don’t know who 'they' are, because sometimes those take a long time.”
Meanwhile, the 64-year-old Mainieiri watched the game alone Sunday in the theater room of his home in Baton Rouge, La. He retired from coaching after last season, with his final 15 seasons spent coaching LSU after leaving Notre Dame.
He admitted via text message that he sobbed uncontrollably when the Irish team flashed the 2002 CWS team banner before dogpiling on top of Findlay.
“The neat thing is those guys came back this year,” Jarrett said of a 2002 reunion roughly six weeks ago in which those players and Mainieri mingled with the current team. “I think it was the first time they’d been back together on campus.
“Coach Mainieri is a good friend of mine. To have those guys there, it meant a lot to me. … Coach Mainieri talked to me about what it was like to coach at Notre Dame with some of the distinctions that we have with the academic demand these guys have and the travel and the indoor preseason practice.
“And I kind of looked at it as a positive in how you make those indoor workouts (work) and all the things we talked about. They all kind of came together. And you guys got to watch it. So (it's) really cool.
“That kind of stuff is fairytale stuff.”
NATIONAL SUPER REGIONAL SCORES, SCHEDULES
All times are Eastern/Records updated after each result
► Notre Dame (40-15) at No. 1 Tennessee (57-9)
Friday: Notre Dame 8, Tennessee 6
Saturday: Tennessee 12, Notre Dame 4
Sunday: Notre Dame 7, Tennessee 3
Notre Dame advances to CWS.
► No. 9 Texas (47-20) at No. 8 East Carolina (46-21)
Friday: East Carolina 13, Texas 7
Saturday: Texas 9, East Carolina 8
Sunday: Texas 11, East Carolina 1
Texas advances to CWS.
► No. 12 Louisville (42-21-1) at No. 5 Texas A&M (42-18)
Friday: Texas A&M 5, Louisville 4
Saturday: Texas A&M, Louisville 3
Texas A&M advances to CWS.
► Oklahoma (42-21) at No. 4 Virginia Tech (44-14)
Friday: Oklahoma 5, Virginia Tech 4
Saturday: Virginia Tech 14, Oklahoma 8
Sunday: Oklahoma 11, Virginia Tech 2
Oklahoma advances to CWS.
► UConn (50-15) at No. 2 Stanford (46-16)
Saturday: UConn 13, Stanford 12
Sunday: Stanford 8, UConn 2
Monday at 4 p.m. (ESPN2)
► Arkansas (42-19) at No. 10 North Carolina (42-21)
Saturday: Arkansas 4, North Carolina 1
Sunday: Arkansas 4, North Carolina 3
Arkansas advances to CWS.
► Ole Miss (36-22) at No. 11 Southern Mississippi (47-18)
Saturday: Ole Miss 10, Southern Mississippi 0
Sunday: Ole Miss 5, Southern Mississippi 0
Ole Miss advances to CWS.
► No. 14 Auburn (41-20) at No. 3 Oregon State (48-17)
Saturday: Auburn 7, Oregon State 5
Sunday: Oregon State 4, Auburn 3
Monday at 7:30 p.m. (ESPN2)
The determination of the Men’s College World Series order of first-round games both Friday, June 17, and Saturday, June 18, will be announced Monday, June 13. The ESPN family of networks and http://www.ncaa.com/mcws will release the MCWS game dates and times as soon as they are available.The Men’s College World Series begins play Friday, June 17, at Charles Schwab Field Omaha in Omaha, Neb.
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