Despite win, Arizona baseball’s path to the postseason remains rocky | Michael Lev

Even after Sunday’s 11-7 victory over Kansas State, Chip Hale and Arizona remain a long shot — at best — to make the NCAA Tournament for a fifth consecutive season.

With a sub-.500 record and an RPI in the 150s, the Tucson Wildcats’ one and only path is to win the Big 12 Tournament.

First, they have to make the Big 12 Tournament.

With another series loss on its résumé, Arizona sits at 6-12 in conference play. The UA is tied with Texas Tech for 12th place among the 14 Big 12 teams that play baseball. Twelve make the Big 12 Tournament. The Red Raiders hold the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Wildcats should it come to that.

The way the tournament is structured this year, it’s in every team’s best interest to finish as high as possible in the regular season. The first day of the May 19-23 tourney at Surprise Stadium features the bottom four seeds. The winners of those games face the seventh and eighth seeds the next day.

If you’re in the top six, you get a double bye and need to win only three games to win the tournament. That’s a much more manageable task than winning five (or even four) games in a row.

Hale put it bluntly Sunday: “We have to start winning series.”

Missed opportunity

Arizona had a chance to do just that — and improve its position in the standings — against Kansas State. The UA entered the weekend at 5-10 in the Big 12 with momentum on its side, having notched its first conference series win of the season at TCU and following that up with a victory at ASU. Kansas State was 7-8.

Arizona did not take advantage of the opportunity despite getting stellar starting pitching from Owen Kramkowski and Smith Bailey.

Kramkowski pitched into the eighth inning Friday. He blanked K-State through seven. KSU turned two singles and a passed ball into the tying run.

Kramkowski’s final line: 7⅓ innings, six hits, one unearned run, one walk, six strikeouts. Exactly what you want. Exactly what Arizona needed.

Except the UA offense didn’t do its part. And a gamble in the bottom of the eighth didn’t pay off.

Andrew Cain led off the inning with a triple. After Maddox Mihalakis struck out on three pitches — more on him in a bit — Cain tried to score on a pitch in the dirt that bounded a few feet away from KSU catcher Bear Madliak. Madliak scampered to grab the ball and shoveled it to pitcher Miles Smith, who tagged Cain just before he tapped the plate with his right hand.

ESPN+ announcer Daron Sutton summarized Cain’s gambit perfectly: “It was a great slide. I don’t know if it was a great choice.”

Arizona did not score. Kansas State nudged a run across in the ninth vs. Garrett Hicks. Final score: KSU 2, UA 1. Close game. Tough ending. Nothing to be ashamed of.

The next night, Bailey took the ball. And he was magnificent.

Bailey literally authored one of the best starts in UA history — six innings, one hit, zero runs, one walk, 15 strikeouts.

Only one KSU player reached second base while Bailey was on the bump. Only three reached base, period (single, walk, hit-by-pitch).

Yet when Bailey exited after throwing 99 pitches — he likely would have gone out for the seventh inning if the UA-BYU series wasn’t starting on a Thursday — Arizona held a minuscule 1-0 lead. Then the bullpen — perhaps the biggest factor in the UA winning 5 of 7 entering the KSU series — absolutely imploded.

Patrick Morris yielded a three-run homer in the seventh. Corey Kling and Benton Hickman combined to allow eight runs in the eighth. Somehow, an all-time great pitching performance by Bailey turned into an 11-1 run-rule defeat.

The on-paper formula for Arizona’s success this season was to get quality starts from Bailey and Kramkowski and score just enough to win games and series. It didn’t work this past weekend because UA hitters went 2 for 23 with runners on base and 0 for 13 with runners in scoring position in the first two games.

Growing pains

Unfortunately, the 11 runs Arizona scored Sunday were more anomalous than the two it scored in the first two games. The Wildcats — with a lineup full of freshmen — have the worst offense in the Big 12.

Transfer Tyler Bickers and returnee Easton Breyfogle were supposed to provide experience and production atop the lineup. Both suffered season-ending shoulder injuries after appearing in a combined 12 games.

Mihalakis, a senior, hasn’t been the same player as a year ago, when he was a starter on a College World Series team. Mihalakis had a .775 OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) in 2025. This year it’s .582.

Despite his struggles, Mihalakis leads Arizona with 26 RBIs. Fifty-three Big 12 players have more. Four have more than twice as many.

Six UA players have 20-plus RBIs. Three are freshmen: Nate Novitske, Jackson Forbes and Tony Lira.

Freshmen account for almost exactly half of Arizona’s hits — 173 of 345. They made up the entire infield Sunday — the aforementioned trio plus Cash Brennan — while Caleb Danzeisen started in right field.

Hale conceded that he has one eye on the future. But, he added, “I also think sometimes they’re the best option to win the game.”

Hale remains a firm believer in recruiting and developing high school players while supplementing the roster with transfers. That strategy can lead to seasons like this one.

Brennan’s brother, Payton, went through a similar experience at UCLA. He was a redshirt freshman in 2024, when the youthful Bruins went 19-33. Two years later — with many of those same players now upperclassmen — UCLA is the No. 1 team in the country.

That doesn’t make the growing pains any more tolerable. Arizona moved its postgame huddle into the clubhouse Saturday night because “we kinda wanted to talk about some stuff,” veteran outfielder TJ Adams said. Hale said the dugout was more deflated than it had been all season.

Earlier that evening, Arizona honored the 1986 squad that won the national championship. It took the Wildcats 26 years to win another. The ’87 club made the NCAA Tournament but went two-and-out. Three of the next four UA teams didn’t make it at all.

It was a different time, but it still holds true that Omaha is a tough act to follow. After they won it all in 2012, the Wildcats missed the NCAA Tournament three years in a row. After reaching the CWS finals in 2016, Arizona missed the tournament in two of the next three seasons.

You know who else is 6-12 in conference play this year? Defending national champion LSU, which has a lot more resources than Arizona.

The SEC Tournament features all 16 of its members, so the Tigers will have a shot no matter what. Hale’s teams have done some of their best work in conference tourneys. The 2022 and ’23 Wildcats used the Pac-12 Tournament to boost their résumés. The ’24 and ’25 Cats were tournament champs.

This year’s team needs to get there first. It’s not as daunting a challenge as saving the planet, but it won’t be easy.