Oklahoma baseball: Twenty-six years ago Sooners were kings of college baseball
By Chip Rouse
The month is April, which means we should be feasting right now on baseball, including Oklahoma baseball. We should be, but we’re not. In fact we’re learning what it’s like to live in a world absent of all live sporting event because of global coronavirus pandemic.
Because college baseball begins over a month earlier than the major league teams, the Sooners were already a third of the way into the season, with 14 wins in 18 games and ranked 13th in the last USA Today College Baseball Top 25 before the remainder of the season was shuttered.
Who knows what would have happened if the rest of the season had not been cancelled, but with two wins already over ranked opponents, it appeared that this could have been a good year for Oklahoma baseball.
That got me thinking about other strong seasons — as in College World Series-strong years, of which there haven’t been many in the last quarter of a century.
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Oklahoma has made 17 trips to the NCAA Division I Baseball Tournament since 1994, but they have made it as far as Omaha, annual site of the College World Series, just three times during that span.
The 1994 Sooner baseball squad ran the table, registering a perfect 8-0 record in its postseason run to the College World Series title and OU’s second national championship in baseball (the first title came in 1951 in the Sooners’ inaugural trip to the CWS).
The 1994 Oklahoma team probably wasn’t the best of the eight teams that made it to the CWS that season, but that group of Sooners played extremely hard and played for each other in the true definition of a team. Interestingly, the team’s motto that season was “Twenty-five guys pulling on the same rope.”
OU was seeded fourth in the eight-team championship field. The Sooners slipped by No. 5 Auburn by one run in their opening-round game of the 1994 College World Series, and then defeated No. 8 Arizona State in back-to-back games to advance to the championship game against No. 2 seed Georgia Tech.
The Georgia Tech lineup featured a couple of position players who went on to outstanding careers in the major leagues: shortstop Nomar Garciappara and catcher Jason Varitek. The two teams were tied at 2-2 after three innings before Oklahoma erupted for five runs in the fourth and tacked on four more in the sixth to put the game out of reach.
The game ended in a 13-5 OU runaway, with the Sooners pounding out 16 hits and taking advantage of four Georgia Tech errors. Tim Walton, who pitched two innings in relief of Sooner starter Kevin Lovinger, was credited with the win, and OU outfielder Chip Glass, who went yard three times in that year’s CWS, including in the championship game, was named the Most Outstanding Player of the 1994 CWS.
Remarkably, Oklahoma trailed in only one of 72 innings in 1994 NCAA postseason play.
It’s been 10 years since the Sooners last appeared in the College World Series, but Oklahoma still ranks in the top 10 of all teams that have made it that far, with 10 all-time appearances. And the Sooners’ 15 CWS victories ranks in the top 20.