The Mississippi State baseball team’s roller coaster ride of a season began with three straight “humiliating” defeats at Southern Miss.
Two days later, Bulldogs head coach Andy Cannizaro was forced to resign for what he termed “poor decisions,” which reportedly included an extramarital affair with an athletic department employee.
Pitching coach Gary Henderson was made interim head coach and had “20 minutes” to speak to the team before boarding a bus with the players for a 12-day, eight-game road trip.
At midseason, Mississippi State’s record was still below .500. Things began to come together for the Bulldogs shortly thereafter. It is a late-season surge, however, that makes this what Henderson “the biggest story in college baseball.”
There was a three-game sweep of defending national champion Florida in the final weekend of the regular season, four straight elimination game victories in the NCAA Regionals and, finally, a 10-6, 11-inning win over Vanderbilt that sent Mississippi State to the College World Series.
The Bulldogs (37-27) open the CWS on Saturday night against Washington (35-24) in Omaha, Neb.
“It’s a great night for Mississippi State,” Henderson said in a postgame interview on ESPN moments after beating Vanderbilt.
The reporter said: “It’s also a great night for you.”
To which Henderson dropped this: “And the ’84 Aztecs. The ’84 Aztecs were watching and that is for them, and Mississippi State.”
How is it that a coach caught up in the emotion and euphoria of taking his team to the CWS comes to drop a 34-year-old reference out of nowhere?
Well, you have to know something about Gary Henderson, a right-handed pitcher at San Diego State from 1982-84, and that ’84 SDSU team.
Why the shoutout, Henderson was asked in a phone interview earlier this week?
“Because you know they’re out there and you know they’re with you,” he said. “Those are your guys. You love them. We didn’t get to go.
“We should have gone.”
As exhilarating as that postseason moment was the other night for Mississippi State is as agonizing as it was 34 years ago for the Aztecs.
See, SDSU was on the other end of a game like that, which, in fact, also went 11 innings.
SDSU lost 8-7 to Cal State Fullerton in the 1984 NCAA West I Regional final. That advanced the Titans to the College World Series, where they went on to win the national championship.
“They actually told all of us that we were the best team they faced,” former SDSU outfielder Lewie Graham said. “That we were better than any team they faced in the World Series. All the Cal State Fullerton guys told us that.”
They could be right.
The ’84 Aztecs had arguably the best team in school history.
They opened the season with nine straight wins, lost a game, then won nine more in a row. A 16-game winning streak soon followed on the way to a 38-4 start.
The team won a school-record 66 games (there was no 56-game regular season limit as there is now). The Aztecs averaged nearly eight runs a game, while the pitching staff allowed half that many.
Sophomore outfielder Chris Gwynn was the team’s star, earning All-American honors after batting .383 and setting school records with 19 home runs and 95 RBIs. Gwynn and shortstop Flavio Alfaro both were of the U.S. Olympic team that summer.
In 1984, SDSU reached the NCAA Regionals for the fifth time in six years, although the Aztecs had never advanced to the regional final.
For the past two decades, the tournament has been a 64-team affair that requires winning a regional and best-of-three super regional to reach the CWS. In 1984, it was a 36-team tournament with eight regional winners headed straight to Omaha.
The ’84 Aztecs were a win away after fighting through the loser’s bracket in the Fresno regional amid temperatures that climbed as high as 110 degrees.
A pitching staff already missing injured ace left-hander Bill Blount would be taxed to the limit. Reliever Phil Torres was among those who stepped up in his absence.
The Aztecs beat host Fresno State twice in between a 16-6 loss to Fullerton in their first three games. Then SDSU defeated the Titans 9-5 to force a winner-take-all final.
Henderson started that game, but left on a stretcher after twisting his knee going after a foul popup behind the plate. It was the final cruel twist in a season that included getting a bad case of the flu, then chicken pox.
In the final, the Aztecs fell behind 7-0 in the first three innings before starting to rally.
They strung some singles together for a run in the fourth and Gwynn hit a three-run homer in the fifth to make it 7-4. Two-out singles in the seventh by Steve Barnard and Joe Holvey ed for three more runs and it was 7-7.
Lost at the time was a play in the sixth when Holvey was tagged out while attempting to score standing up on a single by catcher John Carlson. A slide there by Holvey and the Aztecs presumably win the game.
Graham was the on-deck hitter on the play and never motioned for Holvey to slide. Was he caught up in the moment?
“Probably,” Graham said this week. “I was just too excited. … I have no idea. At that point of the game, nobody ever thought about it.”
Graham has been ribbed about it ever since. And probably always will.
“Those are close friends,” Graham said. “If they weren’t close friends, I wouldn’t be able to take it. They’re just kidding. But they bring it up every single time we get in a group.
“I can take it,” Graham added with a laugh. “A lesser man couldn’t take it. If I’ve got to be ed for one thing, then so be it. I don’t worry about it. I had a good year and good career and made a lot of friends and so none of that bothers me.”
After all they had been through over the weekend and after coming back from seven runs down, the run Fullerton scored in the bottom of the 11th inning was crushing.
“Losing that game the way we lost the game hurt everybody to the core,” Gwynn said this week. “Thirty-some years later and I everything like it was yesterday. I can see everything vividly.”
Holvey, on his knees with his back to the plate, stared blankly to the outfield. Carlson, who caught with a cast on his fractured thumb, was on his knees as well behind the plate trying to process what had just been snatched away from them.
“They’re every bit as good as the team that won,” SDSU head coach Jim Dietz said at the time, “but that doesn’t count for much at this moment. Fullerton is going to Omaha and all we did was get awfully close. It’s a sad thing.
“I thought it was remarkable the way we came back. Most teams would have folded.”
The bond between the players on the ’84 Aztecs was too strong to ever give up. But how do you ever get over such a loss?
“I’m not sure you ever do,” Henderson said. “Your perspective gets better. You get married, you have kids, parents . So you look back at it. In of appreciating the time and valuing the relationships, it’s a pretty special time of life and I think those guys would agree with me.
“It was a team that was good enough to win and we knew it.”
Most teams would have folded.
It’s something Henderson could say about this Mississippi State team. Instead, the Bulldogs are playing for a national championship.
Henderson, who already has been Perfect Game/Rawlings Coach of the Year, is the first interim coach to lead his team to the CWS, according to the NCAA.
It is the brightest moment in a 30-year coaching career that included eight years as Kentucky head coach and began in 1988 as the SDSU junior varsity coach (yes, they used to have a JV).
Henderson said he doesn’t spend too much time talking about the past with his current players.
“They don’t hear about our ’84 team,” he said. “I’ve never dropped that on them. They’d think you’re a damn dinosaur.
“But they’re constantly hearing me talk about some version of perspective and appreciation and gratitude. Make the most of your opportunity. I’ve hit them twice with that already. …
“That was a special time for me and my friends and my teammates. That group of guys loves each other. You can’t say that when you’re 22, but you can when you’re 55. That was a special time. I appreciate those guys and they appreciate each other.”
Gwynn is included on a text chain with several former teammates. He said his phone began beeping late Sunday night after Henderson’s shoutout.
“That was awesome,” Gwynn said. “It just shows me that loss hit everyone pretty deep. We were right there. Right there. Right there. … I feel like I’m living through (Henderson) right now. I just want him to know we all are appreciative of it. It didn’t go unnoticed. He was a part of that team. It was a kinship.”
In a corner of California — and scattered elsewhere across the country — there is a group of guys who will be tuning in to watch Mississippi State, even though they have no connection to the Bulldogs other than their mentality.
And a coach who deserves to have the word interim removed from his title.
“I have to watch now,” Gwynn said. “I’m locked in.”
[email protected] / on Twitter: @sdutkirKDKenney
