Brown: UK baseball aims to avoid first-time flameout at College World Series

Kentucky baseball embarks on a difficult task as a first-time participant in the College World Series on Saturday. Omaha hasn’t been so kind to first-timers in the recent past. 

The Wildcats aim to be an exception.

“It feels like we’ve really kicked the door down now,” said UK outfielder Nolan McCarthy after the Super Regional series-clinching win against Oregon State on Sunday. “We have unfinished business. It feels amazing to be the first ones.”

Since 2000, 17 schools did not advance to the finals in their first appearance in Omaha, including seven teams that promptly dropped their first two games and were eliminated.

(In Louisville’s inaugural appearance in 2007, it lost to No. 2 seed Rice, beat Mississippi State in an elimination game, then was knocked out of the CWS by No. 3 seed North Carolina.) 

TCU was the only notable team among those 17, winning three games in 2010 and finishing just shy of the finals losing an elimination game to UCLA.

And then there was Coastal Carolina. 

The Chanticleers made it 18 teams since 2000 who reached the CWS for the first time. They made good on their first and only appearance in Omaha in 2016 by taking down Arizona to win the national title.

The Cats could duplicate Coastal’s improbable run as a newcomer to the biggest stage in college baseball, but it wouldn’t be considered much of a surprise.

Kentucky earned its No. 2 national seed. 

Most first-time teams pulled off some kind of upset to get to Omaha. Of the previous teams to make the CWS for the first time this century, only Nebraska (8) in 2001 and Vanderbilt (6) and Tulane (5) in 2011 were national seeds.

While the Cats haven’t been a perennial baseball power, they have played like it this season. So the allure of just getting there, which leads to some teams undoing, won’t be a factor for the Cats.

This is a veteran team.

Redshirt sophomore James McCoy is the youngest player in terms of eligibility who is a regular starter. And everyone else who is a mainstay in the lineup has at least three years of experience. 

The same goes for its starting rotation of pitchers. Trey Pooser and Dominic Niman are both graduate students. And Mason Moore is a junior.

The Cats embody the “get old, stay old” mantra shared by many coaches in college sports.  

UK won the Southeastern Conference regular-season title in a year the league sent a record 11 teams into the NCAA Tournament and placed four teams in the CWS along with the Atlantic Coast Conference. In winning a school-record 22 league games, UK won a program-record 11 of those on the road. 

None of this was a surprise in Lexington. The Cats simply lived up to the expectations they set for themselves.

Pitcher Cameron O’Brien, a graduate transfer from Campbell, said during his recruitment coach Nick Mingione told him they could “do something that’s never been done.”

“So to sit here and be doing something that’s never been done before is pretty awesome,” O’Brien said. “And we’re definitely not done yet.”

Kentucky’s pitching staff only ranks fifth in earned run average among the eight teams competing in Omaha. Its overall hitting doesn’t jump out either, as its .287 batting average ranks seventh, above only Florida of remaining teams.

But what the Cats do have, and Mingione is banking on, is a group that pushes each other to be great. The team ranks in the top 25 nationally in doubles, total stolen bases, sacrifice bunts, hits allowed and fielding percentage.

“The strength of our team is our team,” he said. 

Kentucky accomplished a lot of firsts this season, be it “first-ever” or “first in a long time,” just to get to Omaha. The Cats have one more first to check off the list.

Reach sports columnist C.L. Brown at clbrown1@gannett.com, follow him on X at @CLBrownHoops and subscribe to his newsletter at profile.courier-journal.com/newsletters/cl-browns-latest to make sure you never miss one of his columns.