Top 10 Arizona sports stories of the year, as selected by FOX Sports Arizona staff.
Arizona baseball coach Andy Lopez made it a challenge to himself: He’ll watch all five of the Wildcats’ College World Series games by the end of 2012.
He’ll find that nothing has changed – Arizona is still the winner and that he has the second national title of his coaching career.
When Arizona defeated two-time defending champion South Carolina to give Arizona its first baseball title since 1986, it capped a perfect 11-0 postseason run. The Wildcats did not trail at any point while in Omaha. They outscored opponents 27-8 in five games.
"That’s unheard of," Lopez said. "We were never behind."
With a veteran team led by a strong junior class, Lopez saw the potential early. In fact, it was two years earlier when the then-freshman class didn’t lose a game in March. He saw it again when UA swept highly regarded Stanford in Tucson.
"I told my wife on the way home that we might have something special here," Lopez said. "I told her this team was good enough to go a long way. Hopefully we could stay healthy and get hot at the right time because that’s what it takes."
And Arizona did, riding the pitching of Kurt Heyer, Konner Wade and James Farris and the bats of Pac-12 Player of the Year Alex Mejia, Robert Refsnyder, Seth Mejias-Brean and Johnny Field on an unstoppable postseason roll.
-- Steve Rivera
