Chase Shores plays the role of unexpected hero for LSU baseball in College World Series
Shores entered the game with one out in the seventh. LSU was leading 5-3 after a Coastal Carolina hit a two-run homer to cut the lead. Shores' first pitch was a groundout. Then Blake Barthol came to the plate, one of Coastal's top sluggers. Shores struck out Barthol on three pitches. The final pitch, a swinging strike, was 101 miles per hour. Nasty stuff.
LSU needed a reliever to step up in Omaha, and Shores delivered. In Shores last five outings, four were scoreless. In that span, he did not issue a single walk.
Shores is likely heading to the professional ranks now. He finished his LSU career on a high note, but it wasn't smooth sailing.
After LSU head coach Jay Johnson arrived at LSU in 2021, Shores was one of the first big-time prospects to commit. According to Perfect Game, Shores was a top-30 overall prospect in the class of 2022. That caliber of player doesn't always make it to campus, but LSU got Shores to Baton Rouge.
Shores made LSU's weekend rotation as a freshman in 2023. He owned a 1.96 ERA after 18.1 innings, but then Shores' freshman campaign came to an abrupt stop as the big righty was forced to have Tommy John surgery. That knocked Shores out for the rest of 2023 and all of 2024.
As 2025 rolled around, Shores was healthy. After two years of recovery, Shores made the weekend rotation as LSU's No. 3 starter.
Shores' first two starts were solid. He allowed just one earned run in 10 combined innings vs. Purdue Fort Wayne and Omaha. Shores struck out 13 and walked two. But then came the hiccups.
Shores allowed four runs vs. Sam Houston State before surrendering nine hits in five innings vs. North Alabama. Then, Shores didn't make it out of the fourth inning in LSU's opening SEC series vs. Missouri. Shores' April was up and down, and Jay Johnson made a chance ahead of LSU's series vs. Alabama.
Shores was moved to the bullpen.
Shores didn't look too comfortable there, either. Shores' first five relief appearances resulted in runs for the opposing lineup. It started to look like a lost year.
Then, Shores pitched back-to-back scoreless outings vs. South Carolina and 2.2 scoreless innings in the SEC Tournament. With LSU unable to find consistent options in the pen, that little run made Shores one of Johnson's top relievers.
That led us to the NCAA Tournament. Aside from a bump vs. Little Rock, Shores was flawless in the postseason.
Shores' emergence gave Johnson another arm he could trust. Most thought Casan Evans would be the one to close it out on Sunday, but he wasn't needed with the way Shores was pitching.
Nobody ever doubted Shores' talent. It's the same talent that will catch the attention of several MLB organizations when the draft rolls around. It was just a matter of putting it all together.
In another world, Shores stays healthy in 2023 and becomes the best Friday night starter in college baseball in 2024 and 2025. But things don't always go to script. Shores made the most of his situation and peaked at just the right time. Now he's a two-time national champion.
"I mean, he was a weekend starter on the 2023 National Championship team as a freshman. His last pitch of that season was a 97-mile-an-hour fastball that struck somebody out from Tennessee with a box rocket. And then he had to go through the 18-month recovery rehab and persevered through all of that. And there's nobody I would have rather had finish the game tonight for this second national championship than Chase Shores," Johnson said.
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New York Times
18 minutes ago
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Sliders: For new Baseball Hall of Fame class, growing the game means rethinking the way in
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So all of a sudden, the Hall of Fame has a ton of money that they did not expect to have.' Eventually, the oversaturation of the card market led to Donruss' demise. But Perez's work continues, and the Diamond Kings' legacy survives in the form of a permanently endowed internship program now in its 25th year. Peggy Steele, who owned and operated Perez-Steele Galleries, said that 33 alumni are returning this weekend to help with induction ceremonies. 'We always felt like you give back where you make it,' she said. 'That's where the Hall continues to benefit. If we hadn't had that relationship, it never would have happened.' Tom Hamilton was born in Wisconsin in 1954, a year after Major League Baseball arrived in Milwaukee. The Braves would leave for Atlanta while Hamilton was still in grade school, but the Brewers arrived in his high school years, giving Hamilton a new team — and another set of broadcasters — to follow. Hamilton, this year's Ford C. 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Then he did the Packers and Badgers on radio. So to do a year of University of Wisconsin football with Earl was kind of like: 'I'm playing center field next to Hank Aaron.'' Merle Harmon: 'Listen to Merle Harmon's football calls. He was the voice of the Jets when Joe Willie (Namath) won the Super Bowl. He was really good. He initially was the No. 1 guy for the Brewers, and Bob was the No. 2 guy. And the only reason Merle gave up the Brewers (was because) he was going to do the Olympics for NBC in 1980. He had to give up the Brewers to do it.' Bob Uecker: 'Well, he was so funny — none of us can be that — but I don't think Bob's ever been given credit for how good he was at play-by-play. He was phenomenal, to the point that when I started going out on my own and doing games, I had to make sure I wasn't imitating Bob — you know, 'get up, get out of here, gone!' There's only one Bob. But I think because he was so accomplished in everything else and is noted for the movies, the beer commercials, Johnny Carson, I don't think he got enough recognition for being an incredible play-by-play guy on radio.' Gary Bender: 'He was at Madison, he was a sports anchor, but he did Badger football and Packer football. And then he went from Madison to be the main guy for CBS. He did the Final Four, the North Carolina State-Houston game. And the one thing about those four guys — Earl, Merle, Bob, Gary Bender — they were as good of people, if not better, than they were broadcasters. And they were incredible broadcasters.' Eddie Doucette: 'I never got to know Eddie, but he was doing Milwaukee Bucks basketball on radio when they had Lew Alcindor and Oscar Robertson. And Eddie, oh my god — energetic creativity. He's the one that came up with the 'jack-knife jumper' and 'into the low post in the toaster to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.' He came up with Bobby 'The Greyhound' Dandridge, and the 'sky hook' for Kareem. I've never been that creative, but those are all terms he used. That's why I always said about Hawk (Harrelson): 'When people are imitating your calls or your vocabulary, that sets you apart from everybody.'' The 75 percent threshold for election to the Hall of Fame serves two purposes. It's a high enough figure to be a landslide, but low enough so a few misguided voters can't influence the outcome. The result is what matters — in or out? The rest is just details. Advertisement Of course, one detail of Ichiro Suzuki's election has generated plenty of conversation: He fell a single vote short of joining Mariano Rivera as the only unanimous electees to Cooperstown. That very fact shows that there's always been a lot of curious, stray votes among the hundreds in each election. The point is that Suzuki cleared 75 percent. And while there's no excuse for even one voter to pass over such a decorated candidate, remember that writers used to be really, really stingy. Consider the case of Yogi Berra, who hit 30 homers twice and batted .300 four times, qualifying him for the center square of last Saturday's Grid. Berra did pretty much everything else, too: three MVP awards, 10 World Series titles, 15 years in a row as an All-Star, the life of a legend. Yet when Berra first came before the Baseball Writers' Association of America, for the 1971 election, only 242 of 360 voters checked his box — 28 shy of election. Could you imagine? In fact, nobody was elected on that 1971 ballot, which featured 16 players who eventually would get plaques. 'Sure I'm disappointed,' Berra told Dick Young of the New York Daily News. 'But then, DiMag didn't make it his first year, either.' At the time, only four candidates had been elected on the first ballot since the initial class of 1936: Bob Feller, Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams and Stan Musial. Some fairly decent players — Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott and, yes, Joe DiMaggio — were forced to wait their turn. Players now must wait five years to be included on the ballot, but DiMaggio, who retired after the 1951 World Series, was deemed eligible in 1953. Yet the writers made him get in line behind Dizzy Dean and Al Simmons, who both made it on their ninth try. DiMaggio fell 81 votes short. In 1954, DiMaggio missed by 14 votes, with Bill Dickey (ninth ballot), Rabbit Maranville (14th) and Bill Terry (14th) getting the call. DiMaggio finally made it in 1955, and Berra got in easily on his second try, in 1972, with newcomer Sandy Koufax and 300-game winner Early Wynn, who had been denied three times. 'It is great to make it, whether it takes one, two, three or four years,' Berra said then. 'It doesn't matter.' It's been 10 years since a newly elected Hall of Fame duo matched up precisely with their years in the game. Randy Johnson and John Smoltz, from the class of 2015, both started in 1988 and finished in 2009. Now it's CC Sabathia and Ichiro Suzuki, who made their MLB debuts in 2001 and played their final games in 2019. Advertisement When speaking about Suzuki, Sabathia often mentions a game that served as a fulcrum in his career. On July 30, 2005, with Cleveland, Sabathia took the mound in Seattle after one of his worst starts ever: an eight-run shelling in Oakland. It brought his ERA to 5.24 and prompted a meaningful bullpen session with Indians pitching coach Carl Willis. 'I was trying to learn an out pitch,' Sabathia recalled last week. 'I was getting to two strikes and I was getting a lot of foul balls. I couldn't get a strikeout. And we went down to the bullpen in Oakland and he taught me how to throw a cutter, and it came out like an 82 mph slider. And I was like, 'Oh, this thing is good. I'm taking this into the game.'' Against Suzuki in Seattle, however, Sabathia's new cutter/slider met its match. 'I throw him a slider, (he) hits it off the window in Safeco,' Sabathia said, referring to a second-level restaurant at the Mariners' ballpark, then known as Safeco Field. 'I was like, 'All right, you know, that's Ichi. I could keep throwing this thing.' Comes back up later in the game, I throw it to him (on a 1-1) pitch, he takes it deep again. 'But that ends up being, like, the best pitch of my career, right? It changed my career, being able to throw that pitch. And he just peppered it off the window.' Sabathia was right about his new pitch. He lost that day in Seattle but went 9-1 over the final two months in 2005, a stretch that marked the beginning of a 7 1/2 year prime. Before that start in Seattle, Sabathia's career ERA was 4.26. From August 2005 through the end of the 2012 season, it was 3.10. All he needed was to weather Suzuki's two homers and keep his confidence in the new pitch – which, apparently, was easy to do. After all, as Sabathia said, 'That's Ichi.' (Top photo, l-r, of Suzuki, Sabathia and Wagner in January 2025: New York Yankees / Getty Images)
New York Post
7 hours ago
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