Four young men stand before the entrance to the College World Series. Three are huddled together, caps askew, lifting the other above their heads as he raises a single finger to the sky.
They are no one and everyone, ecstasy cast in bronze to represent every player who has stepped onto Omaha’s storied fields.
Where the 2011 incarnation of the Cal baseball team rests in CWS history remains to be seen. To say the city wept for the Bears may be too saccharine; they exited after three games and didn’t provide TD Ameritrade Park with the same theatrics they pulled off with mechanical regularity throughout the season. Love requires time, and their stay amounted to a summer fling.
But consider yourself lucky if you followed this team — you witnessed Cal athletics at its absolute finest.
The heart of this story was written before Omaha, but figuring out exactly where to start is a more difficult task. Do we trace back to September, when the administration handed the Bears a death sentence? Or follow the team’s blistering start to the season, when it broke in with a 19-6 record? Its miraculous resurrection in April, followed by a 12-13 on-field stumble?
The ups and downs this team has seen through the last few months has been stranger than fiction, a microcosm of life’s unpredictability.
When things looked bleakest, the Bears were at their best. They fell behind by four runs in their first elimination game; three games later, they tapped in four in the ninth inning to win the Houston Regional. They produced six walk-off victories this season. They outscored opponents 97-28 in the eighth and ninth innings.
All sorts of pithy sayings are applicable here. “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” for example. Or you can try, “The Bear does not quit; the Bear does not die.” What sets this season apart from any other is the obstacles along the path, but these phrases are too tired and overused for a team that dazzled the light-less Evans Diamond.
Their future is secure for at least the next decade, and likely for much longer. It’s the way things should be, but with the spectre of extinction gone, the hero has no foil.
Maybe these Bears win the whole damn thing next year. They return most of their core, including Pac-10 Player of the Year Tony Renda. Freshman Derek Campbell, who filled in for Renda at second base when he was sidelined with a strained quad, should slide seamlessly into the middle infield.
The biggest question mark might be pitching. Junior starters Erik Johnson and Dixon Anderson will most likely leave as second- and ninth-round draft selections, and do-it-all senior Kevin Miller departs as well.
But even there, the rotation returns ace Justin Jones and adds the unflappable Kyle Porter, who shined in the postseason as a freshman. Louie Lechich may join them on the mound for an all-lefty weekend.
None of that really matters, because no amount of heavy hardware can replicate that magic that Cal found this spring. It was their resilience that inspired, the way they jumped back into a full sprint after scraping their knees raw. Who among us does not know failure? These Bears spat in its face, helping us again believe in the impossible.
Near the end of Cal’s run, catcher Chadd Krist called this a “team of nobodies.”
Nobody, and everybody.
Jack Wang covers baseball.