Auburn baseball's season sputtered in Omaha after Butch Thompson's assertion. But it was no bust

Butch Thompson and his players appeared at peace.

Not happy to be eliminated from the 2022 College World Series, of course. Thompson even said if the Tigers had won Tuesday night, he would have felt good about their chances Wednesday against Ole Miss.

But he smiled and spoke with pride in a team whose season had finally sputtered with an 11-1 loss to Arkansas in Omaha, Nebraska.

"This was one of the easiest groups to tell them a mission or give a challenge," the coach said. "That's just a special group of guys."

All endings can be at least a little sour. This one will resonate because it was over by the fifth inning; because 15 of the 18 runs Auburn allowed in the College World Series were with two outs; because Sonny DiChiara never homered in Omaha, which would have been a satisfying punctuation for his historic season; because the same offense that scored 51 runs in the regional suddenly was held to five hits or fewer in four of the last five games.

And maybe, for those who bought in, because Thompson had such ambitious goals before Auburn arrived in Omaha. He stood by his "national championship or bust" proclamation: "If you just play the Omaha game, 'Get to Omaha,' it can be like (2019) or other times I've been, when it's two and a barbecue."

This time, three and a barbecue. But is that a bust?

When Thompson was asked the state of the program Tuesday, he said he's not the judge of that.

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It's impossible to reflect on Auburn's 2022 season without evoking the preseason. The SEC coaches predicted Auburn would finish last place in the seven-team SEC West. Nobody predicted DiChiara's .550 on-base percentage, matching Frank Thomas. Nobody predicted Auburn would match a single-season wins record for this century.

Nobody predicted Brody Moore, Kason Howell and Carson Skipper would lead the Tigers back to the promised land of college baseball, where they played in 2019.

As it turned out, Auburn was fourth-best in the SEC West this postseason – and sixth-best in the country.

"A lot of people can say that coming to Omaha is a once-in-a-lifetime thing," Skipper said. "But for me, Brody, Kason, all the guys who have been here twice, it's an incredible feeling to come to a place of such joy and happiness to the whole college baseball world more than one time."

To best contextualize the season, consider this: Auburn won a College World Series game. The last time Auburn did that was before any players on the 2022 roster were born. (Graduate student Tyler Drabick was born Sept. 29 that year.) Tim Hudson was the star pitcher with a head of hair. Now he's the pitching coach, and bald.

Rallying to beat No. 2 seed Stanford in an elimination game was monumental on its own, and it left Auburn with another program-defining moment for this generation. As much as this roster benefitted from experience, the hero was an underclassmen with years of leadership ahead of him still.

"Like a major league ballclub," Thompson called Stanford. "The athleticism."

Now Auburn can concretely say the season was progress. Thompson's third year was a super regional. His fourth year was a College World Series. His seventh was a College World Series with a victory.

"We feel that the best is yet to come," he said.

It's an improbable trajectory for a program reckoning with the recruiting disadvantages caused by Alabama's lack of lottery scholarships. But Thompson and his staff have a knack for spotting talent. Hudson was on the 2002 Oakland Athletics team immortalized by "Moneyball." Valuing walks, piecing together close wins with fewer resources than the competition. Auburn did the same.

DiChiara, perhaps the perfect embodiment of that approach, got one last chance to hit as a college player in the ninth inning. He didn't swing for the fences. He cracked a single and smiled.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Auburn baseball 2022 season: Another unlikely College World Series run