June 7, 2018
By Greg Ostendorf
AuburnTigers.com
AUBURN, Ala. – "Just be who you are."
That's the advice first-year assistant coach Gabe Gross gave this Auburn team prior to the Raleigh Regional, and it's the same advice he's been telling the players leading up to this weekend's Super Regional in Gainesville against No. 1 Florida.
"We have been who we are," Gross said. "It has been good enough to this point. If we play well, we can beat anybody in the country."
Gross first heard that advice in 2008 when he was an outfielder for a Tampa Bay Rays team that posted its first winning season and played in its first postseason. Veterans on the team like Troy Percival and Cliff Floyd told the players just to keep playing the way they had been playing all season. It had been good enough to that point. Why stop?
The Rays wound up making it all the way to the World Series that year.
Gross also knows a thing or two about playing in a super regional. He was a freshman on the 1999 team that took part in the Tallahassee Super Regional and nearly made it to Omaha. That was the last Auburn team to make it that far – until now.
"It's one of the biggest missed opportunities of my life," Gross said. "We had a team that could've not only gone to Omaha but could've won had we gotten there. We were sitting with a 3-2 lead in the ninth with one out with Chris Bootcheck, who was going to be a first-round draft pick, going to throw for us the next day if we win. And it didn't happen.
"If we can somehow find a way to close that game out, I think we've got a fantastic chance of maybe being a national-championship team that year."
That '99 team is not unlike this year's group. It featured a handful of seniors in the lineup like Casey Dunn, Jamie Kersh and Chad Wandall, but there was a group of young up-and-coming players mixed in as well with Gross, Mailon Kent and Todd Faulkner.
"I think there are a ton of similarities," Gross said. "I think in ‘99, we didn't have three or four guys right in the middle that had just exploding numbers. We had nine guys that could hit. Some guys were better than others obviously, but we had a complete lineup. There was not a hole in our lineup. We put pressure on you throughout the lineup, and I think our lineup does that now. I think you've got nine guys that can hurt you.
"Sometimes, it's not hitting home runs, but we've got nine guys that can swing the bat and put pressure on you."
That '99 team also featured three quality starters, an ace in Brent Schoening who went 13-1 that year and a great closer in Colter Bean. This year's team has that quality starting trio in Casey Mize, Tanner Burns and Andrew Mitchell and a great closer in Cody Greenhill. There's also Davis Daniel, who can start or come out of the bullpen.
The only difference is the seniors on the '99 team had been to Omaha and played in a College World Series two years prior. This year's team had never made it out of a regional.
"Even though this group of seniors hadn't been to Omaha, they went to that regional final last year and knew what it was to have that snatched away from them," Gross said. "And I think that made this year's regional different. It was definitely different, and that experience helped."
Gross never made it back to a super regional after that first year. As a sophomore and junior, the Tigers made the NCAA Tournament but lost in the regional. However, 19 years later, the former two-time All-SEC outfielder is back as a coach, and he's now just two wins away from his first trip to the College World Series.
His message this week?
"Just go out, be who you are, play the way you play, don't try to do too much, just do what you do and go play the game of baseball and enjoy it."
Greg Ostendorf is a Senior Writer for AuburnTigers.com. Follow him on Twitter: Follow @greg_ostendorf