Florida State baseball watched in silence as St. John’s wheeled away in celebration at Dick Howser Stadium as the stunning reality set in for the program.
The Seminoles season was over.
St. John’s stunned not just the No. 10 national-seed Seminoles, but the entire Tallahassee Regional field, winning the bracket in three straight games by a combined 32-17 score.
The Red Storm hung on to beat FSU, 5-4, despite the heroic efforts of Cal Fisher, who hit two home runs in the regional final, including a two-run blast to cut the lead to one in the ninth that gave the Seminoles a chance.
It snaps FSU’s run of consecutive regional championships and is only the second time the program hasn’t reached the super regionals under head coach Link Jarrett. The only other season was Jarrett’s first in 2023.
The loss left the crowd at Howser, and the FSU players in the home dugout left in a stunned, eerie silence.
“The hurt is something you can never describe,” A visibly emotional Jarrett said post-game. “I hadn’t been in a dugout that was that eerie and that silent after a loss like that, and the locker room was worse.”
It was a loss that boiled down to moments of opportunism from St. John’s, and some impressive resilience on the mound. The Seminoles had issues pop up on Monday that had been consistent throughout the season, like an inconsistent plate approach, the inability to eliminate wild pitches and a painfully high number of runners left on base.
There were also things that leaned into the unexpected, like John Abraham’s change-up that St. John’s catcher Adam Agresti blasted for a grand slam to flip the game on its head.
The two-out big fly put the Johnnies ahead 4-2 in the fifth inning, and an insurance run was added in the sixth thanks to a wild pitch that put St. John’s ahead 5-2. A lead big enough to withstand FSU’s comeback effort.
Jarrett’s trust in his players is a big part of why the Seminles were hosting, even after Myles Bailey’s season-ending injury, and he believed Abraham could challenge the St. John’s slugger. So he stuck with the righty, despite a pair of walks and a single issued in an inning where Abraham looked unsettled.
“We trust him. We thought he had the mixture of things that could give Agresti some problems, I know it. I know the inning itself did not evolve properly in terms of thinking he had the stuff, but it still checked out, we trust him,” Jarrett said. “I don’t think we’re in the conversation we were in towards the end of the year without him. We knew what we were facing the rest of this day, you’re playing to try to get through it, keep going.”
The Seminoles weren’t without opportunity, leaving eight runners on base in the loss to St. John’s and 29 runners on throughout the four games played in the regional.
FSU’s offense struggled, even with Bailey in the lineup at times, and it’s something Jarrett harped on throughout the season. Pitch selection and at-bat quality were often pointed to by Jarrett as areas that needed improvement, and now that improvement can only come in the offseason, rather than the postseason.
FSU battled injuries in the season, and Jarrett and his staff had to maximize what they had available.
That resulted in a 40-win season, a remarkable achievement for any team at the collegiate level, and a group of players that Jarrett said he’ll think fondly of, irrespective of the hollow end.
“This was different. When you sit out there with Myles (Bailey) when that happens, the heartbreak you have for him. Knowing what that’s going to take to move along and recover from. That he was such a likable figure in the program and nationally. Moving beyond that, watching these guys manage themselves to be the best version of themselves they could be to keep things going,” Jarrett said.
“DeLam(ielleure) was out, (Jace) Estes played 4 or 5 games, was hitting .570, he was starting to figure it out. You wish it had been easier at times, but it just wasn’t. A galvanized tough battalion that seemed to go out there, go into baseball battle as well as any team I’ve seen.”
FSU baseball’s focus shifts to the transfer portal, MLB Draft
Now, the program has to quickly shift its focus to what comes next. The transfer portal is open, as of midnight on June 1, and the Seminoles are going to need to dip heavily into it for a roster overhaul.
Top pitchers Wes Mendes, Trey Beard, Bryson Moore, and Abraham are going to be draft candidates, with Mendes and Beard likely selected in the top three rounds. Alongside the arms, Bailey’s future could reside in an MLB organization, and there should be a few portal incomings and exits that shake up the lineup.
It’s something that Jarrett is aware of, and he’ll have to digest the season-ending loss quickly as the college baseball calendar brutally allows little time to dwell on “what-ifs” over what is now last season’s roster.
“In all of my imagination of what it would be like to coach. Never could you dream of this is where it’s landed in terms of trying to construct a roster to produce a functional team. It is hard. The inconsistencies of year to year who is successful or not, it has escalated to the point of it’s very difficult to even predict, even once it’s together,” Jarrett said.
“Then there’s things that come up that make it extremely hard to have consistency of having 3 regionals in a row. It’s very hard. I think we had 23 or 24 new players. The draft is going to be very similar this year. You have your group of seniors, off they go. You can look at what could come of the next month for us. As coaches, as we try to construct this, it is as hard as anything I ever thought I would do as a college baseball coach.”
Liam Rooney covers Florida State athletics for the Tallahassee Democrat. Contact him via email at LRooney@gannett.com or on Twitter @__liamrooney.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: What’s next for FSU baseball after season-ending loss in Tallahassee Regional
Reporting by Liam Rooney, Tallahassee Democrat / Tallahassee Democrat
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
