In 100th baseball meeting between Arizona and GCU, Lopes make history, show staying power

Seventy times out of 100, a program with four national championships and 18 Men’s College World Series appearances will be the one to beat a pseudo-upstart baseball program like Grand Canyon.

As it turns out, that’s exactly how many times Arizona has defeated GCU on the diamond — and right on the nose how many times the teams have faced each other since the first time the in-state foes met all the way back in 1967.

Game 100 was Friday night in Tucson, in front of the largest college baseball crowd in the history of venerable Hi Corbett Field, and it was the Antelopes’ 9-4 win that knocked the host Wildcats into the loser’s bracket of the NCAA Tournament’s Tucson Regional.

But even in winning 70% of those all-time meetings, a much lower percentage of those UA wins has come of late.

That’s of note, in large part, because of how much the Grand Canyon program has evolved over the past decade-plus — much of it in lockstep with changes to the university’s profile by and large.

After Friday, GCU convincingly, and logistically, has the upper hand in the race to be the last Arizona-based NCAA Division I baseball program still competing this season — that if the UA doesn’t make it out of its own regional alive, and also after ASU missed out on an NCAA Tournament bid altogether for the third consecutive season.

Including Friday, Grand Canyon is not only 3-1 against Arizona in 2024 — that includes three straight overall, the last two taking place in Tucson — but a healthy 7-6 overall in the last four seasons against the Wildcats. That does include 2021, when GCU fell to an Omaha-bound Arizona at Hi-Corbett in another UA-hosted regional.

But GCU didn’t lose this time, and the win was a big one.

Friday marked the first-ever victory in an NCAA Division I Tournament Regional setting for the Grand Canyon program, and it shouldn’t surprise many if the Antelopes got another one Saturday night when they face West Virginia at 7 p.m., again at Hi Corbett (WVU defeated Dallas Baptist 4-1 earlier Friday).

For that matter, it probably wouldn’t be surprising at this point to see GCU get two more this weekend and advance to a first-ever Super Regional.

But second-year GCU coach Gregg Wallis made it clear — both via his in-game coaching decisions and during his postgame press conference — that Friday was about Friday; to even think about the rest of the weekend, the Lopes had to get past the Wildcats.

One Wallis call of note — made in conjunction with GCU pitching coach Nathan Bannister, a former UA hurler himself from 2013-16 — came in the seventh inning. Instead of holding on to his usual Saturday starter, Isaac Lyon, for a possible winner’s bracket game Saturday night, Wallis wanted to win now. So he sent Lyon out to replace Friday night’s starter, Grant Richardson with nine outs to go and GCU up just 6-4.

Lyon made his coach look ever wise, throwing three innings of two-hit ball, striking out four; the Lopes oustscored the Wildcats 3-0 the rest of the way.

“Me and coach Bannister talked a long time about what do we want to do, and we felt like when you’re in a tournament, its different than when you’re in the regular season. You can’t think traditionally — at least we didn’t want to think traditionally,” Wallis said. “Yes, Isaac’s our Saturday starter, but we also felt like Isaac is one of our top two pitchers right now. So we talked before the game and said ‘If we get to the seventh inning and its tied or we have the lead we’re going to go to Isaac.’

“There was a lot of back and forth in the dugout. ‘We’re doing it? We’re doing it, right?” And we just both said ‘this is our best chance,’” he added. “If we’re going to take down the No. 1 seed who’s hosting a regional in front of a sold-out crowd, let’s do it with who we feel our best guy is.”

Wallis also shared how he sells such moves to his players.

“I told our guys just be prepared for anything because this is not a traditional three-game series. We learned a lot in our conference tournament. It’s not a three-game series,” he said. “We’re going to play it differently. This is a tournament.”

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The historic element of Friday’s win wasn’t lost on Wallis, though he hadn’t yet had time to process it, he said.

“That hasn’t all hit me yet. It was a really exciting game. These guys just played great. Started with Grant doing great on the mound, Tyler Wilson leading off the game with a home run and Eddy Pelc taking that huge at bat — bases-clearing double,” he said.

The Grand Canyon baseball program, which competed mostly under the NAIA banner for decades, became an NCAA D-I program in late 1980s. While it has had some names reach big-time status — notably longtime Anaheim Angels outfielder Tim Salmon, the American League Rookie of the Year in 1993 and a World Series champion in 2002 — most of its baseball notoriety has come not long after the university began heavily investing in enhancing its on-campus experience for students after it transitioned to a "for-profit" educational model in the early 2000s (though the university has attempted multiple times in the last decade, unsuccessfully so far, to revert to the more common "nonprofit" academic model).

In 2000, the baseball program joined the school's other sports at the NCAA D-II level, and it wasn’t until 2014 that a D-I jump happened again — this time not just baseball, but across the GCU athletic department.

On the baseball field, with that came a long-term program-building approach from former coach Andy Stankiewicz and a complete overhaul of Brazell Field; it reopened as a sparkling, practically brand-new 4,000-seat ballpark in 2018.

Championships — and more recently NCAA Tournament appearances — have also become the norm. Stankiewicz and the Lopes won WAC regular season titles in 2015, 2017 and 2018. They won both the WAC regular season and conference tournament in 2021 — that’s when the faced Arizona in Tucson in NCAA play — and reached the NCAAs again in 2022. Wallis took over last year when Stankiewicz was hired away by USC, and another conference crown followed suit this year.

And they’ve done a lot of it with Arizona-heavy rosters; this year’s team includes 23 who either played high school or junior college ball in the fittingly nicknamed Grand Canyon State (one of those 23 is from Tucson — freshman infielder Troy Sanders of Catalina Foothills High School).

GCU players Pelc and Richardson were asked postgame Friday about playing with “house money,” since the WAC regular season-champion Lopes were eliminated last week from their conference tournament, only to still receive an NCAA bid. That came after the WAC tourney was won by Tarleton State, ineligible for the NCAAs as it fully completes its transition into a full-fledged D-I program, thus reverting the WAC’s automatic NCAA bid back to regular-season champ GCU.

But the Lopes sure did their part to look the part (again) of belonging against Arizona.

As for the history made Friday: “(It hasn’t) really sunk in about the historic side of it. I’m just excited that we came here and we played great baseball,” Wallis said.

“I told the boys after the game: I’m proud of them not because of what the scoreboard said after the game, (but) because of the way we went about it. We went about it with some intent to play great baseball, and we did,” he added.

“I’m sure the historic side of this will set in later after we can kind of process this,” he said, “but right now I’m just proud of these guys.”

Photos: Arizona falls to GCU in Wildcats' NCAA regional opener