You could tell early on that this team was different.
Maybe it was when senior Blair Dunlap blasted a home run in the squad’s first at bat of the season.
Maybe it was when sophomore ace Gerrit Cole outdueled Vanderbilt star hurler Sonny Gray in UCLA’s first true test.
Or maybe it was when they finally lost. That first blemish did not come until the season’s 23rd game, against Stanford.
In any case, the UCLA baseball team spent the 2010 season opening eyes ““ lots of them, in fact. The Bruins routinely drew more than 1,000 fans to their home games at Jackie Robinson Stadium once the buzz began to build and the wins began to pile up.
“I think we played good baseball the entire season really,” coach John Savage said. “We had a weekend here, a weekend there. But when you’ve been playing good baseball for as long as we have, you’ve really got to give a lot of credit to the team for sticking together and playing well.”
To fully appreciate the Bruins’ 2010 season, one has to understand what transpired a year earlier. The 2009 season featured plenty of Savage’s “here and there” weekends, as the team finished with a 27-29 record and missed the postseason.
And so it was that an offseason filled with introspection and team bonding yielded a campaign that began with a 22-game win streak and ended with the Bruins earning a national seed into the postseason.
“Turning 180 degrees around from last season to the season that we put together this year is definitely a success,” Cole said. “It is definitely something that we will dwell on when our season’s over, and we’ll be proud of ourselves.”
The season-opening streak did more than remedy the bad taste left in the Bruins’ mouths after the 2009 season, and it did more than just nearly equal that season’s output of wins. The success also instilled in the Bruins a certain swagger and a particular belief that this year’s team was built for winning.
“We got off to an unbelievable start, and (the 22 wins) gave us a lot of confidence because we won in a variety of different ways,” junior pitcher Rob Rasmussen said. “Walk-offs, sac flies, we drummed a couple teams, that got us a lot of confidence because we won in myriad ways.”
Still, the season of healing was not without hiccups. The series that was circled on everybody’s calendar turned into a forgetful one for UCLA. Arizona State, ranked No. 3 at the time, barreled into Westwood and right back out again in early May, sweeping three games from then-No. 5 UCLA and providing the Bruins with a critical midseason tipping point.
Would the Bruins revert to their 2009 form, or would they exhibit the growth ““ their first two weekend starters and third-place hitter are all sophomores ““ that had begun to define 2010?
“We hit that little rough patch,” Rasmussen said. “But the true test of our team was coming back from that tough ASU series, and just continuing on and playing our best baseball right now.”
Indeed, UCLA proceeded to sweep its next three Pac-10 series, winning 13 of its final 16 games and earning the opportunity to be a playoff host all the way up to the College World Series.
Asked what he would adjust going into the NCAA regional round, Savage was blunt, and his answer was one that you would not have heard a year ago.
“I don’t think you need to change anything,” he said. “We won 43 games for a reason.”