AUBURN | As Gabe Gross walked off the field at Dick Howser Stadium, he turned to assistant coach Tom Slater and promised he’d take Auburn back to Omaha.
What the then Auburn freshman didn’t know at the time, was it would be 20 years before he could fulfill that pledge.
“I didn’t do it as a player. It’s pretty special to me. Didn’t know it was going to take 20 years but to kind of get back and have a chance as a coach now to be a part of this program going back to Omaha, that’s really special to me,” said Gross after the Tigers beat North Carolina 14-7 to win the Chapel Hill Regional and return to the College World Series for the first time in 22 years.
You can’t really blame Gross for being so confident on that humid night in Tallahassee. The Tigers were swept by Florida State in the Super Regional, but had been to the CWS in 1994 and 97 under Hal Baird. But Baird would retire from coaching a year later, and Auburn wouldn’t make it to a Super Regional again until 2018 and a CWS until now.
Gross went on to play seven years in the major leagues and was a part of the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays team that won the American league before losing to the Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series.
Still, that unfulfilled promise of Omaha never left Gross, who returned to Auburn in 2018 as the team’s hitting coach.
“Omaha is such a special thing in college baseball,” Gross said. “I played in a major league baseball World Series and this, for these guys and even for myself, man, Omaha is such a pie in the sky thing that you look at when you’re growing up and as you get into college baseball, this is beyond special. I have loved every minute of it.
“Watching those boys be able to dog pile. I’ve told them multiple times that X, Y and Z are going to happen and we’re going to be dog-piling going to Omaha. And to watch that come true is awesome.”
The exhilaration Gross felt Monday when the Tigers clinched was more than just going to the CWS. It was also about how much this team has overcome to get there. They’ve dealt with tragedy off the field and on it, they’ve had to overcome pitching injuries and hitting slumps for a trio of top players.
This team had to fight and scrap just to get into the postseason, which makes what they’ve accomplished over the last six NCAA tournament games even more heartening for Gross.
“It’s been really special,” Gross said. “As a coaching staff we were just preaching to the guys in the middle of the year when our pitching was hurt, we were having rough starts, especially midweek, and sometimes on a weekend and hitting wasn’t really coming together, guys were struggling, just that we had to stay together and find ways to win games that we could win.
“Because you just never what’s going to happen in late May and June. Guys get healthy. Pitching got healthy. Guys can get hot, turn season around. And then when we got here, it was just like a breath of fresh air. Everything starts over, this is new, it doesn’t matter what happened in the season before, let’s just get in the moment right now. And they’ve done that.”
Auburn plays Mississippi State at TD Ameritrade Park in the first round of the College World Series Sunday night at 6:30 p.m. CT on ESPN2.
