Editor’s note: For more than six decades, the UA has been college baseball royalty, making 17 College World Series appearances and winning four national championships. The Star is reliving each of the team’s trips to Omaha.
1955: Thomas’ two-hitter highlights Wildcats’ return to Omaha
What went down: Arizona returned to the College World Series one year after its Omaha debut, but suffered the same fate: a heartbreaking loss to Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) in an elimination game. Arizona fell to Western Michigan 4-1 in its CWS opener before Carl Thomas, the Wildcats’ ace, threw a two-hitter in an elimination game against Springfield College while tying the NCAA’s all-time single-game strikeout record with 15. Arizona then thumped Colorado State 20-0, emerging from the loser’s bracket into a reordered Final Four. The Wildcats would get no closer to a title, though: Oklahoma A&M beat them 5-4 in 12 innings, ending the UA’s season.
Wake Forest won the CWS, beating Western Michigan in the championship game.
From the archives: The Star’s Abe Chanin wrote that it was Thomas’ finest pitching performance since a year earlier, when he threw 10 innings in the Wildcats’ College World Series elimination game. He wrote:
The six-foot five-inch Minneapolis mammoth didn’t allow a Springfield batter to get beyond first base and faced only 29 batters over the nine-inning route.
Thomas, with his parents watching from the grandstand on this cold, damp day of the delayed second round of the tournament, gave up a clean single to Joe Kobuskie in the fourth inning and then was tagged for a scratch single in the fifth.
The Maroons from the little Massachusetts college with only 809 students never had a chance as Thomas set down the first 10, and the last 14 batters in order. … Don Gile, who, like Thomas, stands 6-5 and weighs 235, singled to left field and … Arizona had the lead it never relinquished.
He said it: Chanin wrote that the Chicago Cubs offered Arizona first baseman Russ Gragg $4,000 to sign. “He would start in the Class C ball, but the Cubs want him to play center field,” he wrote. “They think he might be able to make the big show within three years. Russ hasn’t decided yet.”
After Omaha: Gragg, a Tucson High graduate, ended up signing with the Cubs. He played in Chicago’s minor-league system for four seasons, leading the Sooner State League in hits (183), batting average (.352), stolen bases (71) and triples (15) in 1956. He then played semipro baseball for seven years before becoming a coach in both Tucson and Yuma. He was inducted into the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame in 2007.
The big number: 68. Thomas’ two-hitter fell on athletic director Pop McKale’s 68th birthday. McKale’s coaches “presented him with the gift of two beautiful nylon sports shirts,” the Star reported.
