PHOENIX — Let’s start by stating an important fact.
Baseball, at any level, but particularly at the collegiate and professional levels, is the most difficult marathon in sports.
It’s every day. You foul a ball off your shin at 95 miles an hour. You stay in the game. You play the next day. You grind it out.
Recently, Arizona State Baseball has been experiencing the most challenging part of this grind, as they fell on Monday afternoon to the Purdue Boilermakers in walk-off fashion by a score of 8-6 in West Lafayette, Indiana.
The loss marked the second consecutive defeat via walk-off for the Sun Devils in the span of 24 hours, and the maroon and gold now sit in a desperate position to make an at-large case for the NCAA Tournament; a place that the program hasn’t reached in the four seasons it has been under the leadership of head coach and ASU Baseball Alumn, Willie Bloomquist.
However, this season in particular, one of Sun Devil Baseball’s most glaring issues continued to show its head yesterday in Indiana: a lack of consistent pitching performances.
This past weekend, in their road series against Cincinnati, the Sun Devils tallied at least seven runs or more offensively, a trend that is not a surprise to keen-eyed fans this season. ASU is the only program in the Big 12 with 400 or more hits, and also sits third in the league in batting average (.311), and runs scored (304), all in its first season in the conference.
But despite their ability to consistently create runs, their ability to produce on the mound has lacked considerably, a trend evident under Bloomquist’s leadership. Prior to 2025, Arizona State’s team ERA sat between 5.95 and 6.76 in the first three seasons under Willie. Now, in their first year in a new conference and under new guidance in the form of first-year pitching coach Jeremy Accardo, the staff has slightly improved, but not by much at 5.43, which sits at 13th in the Sun Devils’ new league.
Throughout this weekend and in particular on Monday, Accardo’s arms struggled to hold any lead they tried to hold serve to against the Boilermakers, blowing a four run lead the offense was able to gather in the middle innings.
But in the ninth, one of ASU’s most consistent relievers, sophomore Derek Schaffer, who gave up one run over two and a third innings of relief and had an ERA under 3.00 entering Sunday, was replaced by another sophomore reliever in Wyatt Halvorson.
Halvorson, praised for his velocity and sky-high potential out of high school, had earned Bloomquist’s respect from the moment he set foot into Tempe, even being the first true freshman to start on opening day for the Sun Devils in more than two decades.
However, after a rollercoaster freshman season in 2024, during which he finished with an ERA near eight, Accardo placed him in a bullpen role to begin 2025, a move that had yet to result in immediate improvements for Halvorson.
So when he came in with a 6-5 ASU lead and just three more outs to get, it seemed this would be a perfect opportunity for Halvorson to prove his validity in a prominent spot to hand the Sun Devils a massive bounce-back win to end the road trip.
He was only able to get one of the three outs necessary, and after giving up a game-tying RBI double, Purdue senior infielder CJ Richmond sent a high and inside fastball from Halvorson 441 feet to right-center field to send the marron and gold on their way back to the valley with a sore taste in their mouths.
Regardless of their pitching woes, the Sun Devils’ lack of time to turn around their season is once
again present due to this loss. In a wide-open conference with six schools with at least nine conference wins or more, including ASU, it will not be easy to go on the run they need to make to prove the selection committee their worthiness.
But as I mentioned earlier, Baseball is a marathon in every sense of the word, and if Bloomquist and his staff can give any wise words to his clubhouse entering the home stretch of the campaign, a saying from Kentucky head coach Nick Mingione could undoubtedly do the trick:
“Yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery, today is a gift, that’s why they call it the present…”
