All season long, Missouri Tigers baseball coach Tim Jamieson waited patiently for his young team to grow up, bond together and play to its potential.
All season long, Jamieson was really waiting for the Big 12 Conference Tournament.
Texas A&M’s Andrew Collazo’s 10th-inning, walk-off home run Sunday afternoon in Oklahoma City to win the Big 12 Championship Game was a tough pill to swallow for a Tigers squad that was a fourth, shocking tournament win away from donning their own conference title gear.
But the inches-from-glory feeling that engulfed the MU players in their final moment of the 2011 season served as the perfect measurement of how far the Tigers had come since the dog days of early spring.
Missouri’s regular season played out to the tune of a full-fledged rebuilding project. An inexperienced team made up of just three everyday seniors followed up a difficult 2010 campaign with consistent struggles to score runs, deliver in the clutch and win away from home.
On its way to a 24-30 regular season record, the Tigers tied a school record for a nine-game losing streak in the month of April – a dark period in MU baseball history in which the Tigers couldn’t seem to buy an event gone right.
Then came the Big 12 Tournament, where the plagues of inexperience disappeared, and the Tigers wrote the story of the little team that could. Seemingly overnight, Missouri had transformed into the underdog without a cage, ripping through conference favorites Texas and Oklahoma State en route to three wins and an appearance in the league’s championship contest for only the third time in program history.
The 2011 MU baseball season will file itself away as a 27-32 campaign without a tournament berth, but hiding within the losing record lies a progression of youth, a maturation from start to finish and the final banding together of a group of young men in an effort to play to the level they were capable of all along.
Though the end result of Sunday’s Championship Game loss was less than desirable, the 2011 trek did amount to what Jamieson hoped it would back amid the close losses of a rain-drenched April.
Despite the flip-of-the-switch transformation, the end to Missouri’s Big 12 Tournament run came in the fitting style of coming up just short. Having once led 6-0 early, the Tiger players had to merely stand by and watch as Collazo’s 10th-inning shot completed the Aggie comeback.
It was no doubt a gut-wrenching feeling for the Tigers to free-fall from a warpath wrecking crew to a team in reflection of the season that was. But in the context of a yearlong struggle to meet potential, perhaps ending on the note of a story that has run out of ink was the end the Tigers needed to justify their means.
