OMAHA, Neb. — In the giddiness of watching one of their own make it to the Men’s College World Series, a group of Enterprise State Community College baseball alums started sending a flurry of texts to coach Samuel “Bubba” Frichter with the same request.
“Can we take the Boll Weevil bus to Omaha?”
The answer, sadly, was no, because the 16-hour-plus trip from Enterprise, Alabama, to Omaha, Nebraska, would violate safety regulations. So, five former Enterprise State Boll Weevil ballplayers made the long trek by car just to see their old teammate Jabe Boroff play for Troy University in the school’s first MCWS.
“It’s the promised land,” said former Enterprise State outfielder Bryce Hinton as he stood outside Charles Schwab Field Omaha on Friday. “We’ve been dreaming about this forever.
“We’ll never have a better reason to come back.”
Hinton, his old coach and the rest of the ex-Weevils did not get the chance to see Boroff hit a home run, or watch Troy come away with a victory, as the Trojans fell 7-5 to No. 16 West Virginia in the opening game of the MCWS.
John Bashford Boroff III — his family started calling him Jabe because it’s easier — let out an audible “Awwhh” when he popped out to the infield in the sixth inning, ultimately going 1-for-3 with a walk and an RBI in Game 1. But Boroff and Troy will get another chance Sunday when they play Ole Miss in an elimination game (2 p.m. ET on ESPN).
The Trojans have been sort of the darlings of the NCAA postseason: They were one of the last four teams in, and they’re the first team in history to make it to the Men’s College World Series after losing 30 games in a season. And Boroff himself is the embodiment of an underdog. He was hitting .125 on May 9 when Troy played South Alabama, but a few weeks later he hit six home runs in the NCAA tournament, earning him the nickname “Jabe Ruth.”
Had it not been for injuries, and a dramatic turnaround, Boroff might still be relegated to backup status. And the Trojans might not even be in Omaha.
Boroff first caught the eye of Troy’s coaching staff when he was in high school at Macon East Academy in Cecil, Alabama, which is about 45 minutes from Troy. During one of Troy’s camps, Boroff hit a ball off a light pole in left field. His mom videotaped it.
But Boroff hurt his elbow his senior year and went the junior college route. Frichter said Boroff slimmed down during his days at Enterprise to prepare for Troy and now looks less like the Bambino.
Boroff hit 20 home runs last year — more than half of the output of the rest of his team at Enterprise. Frichter once saw him hit a 480-foot homer in batting practice. But once he got to Troy and returned from Christmas break at Troy, he didn’t feel right. Something was off when he stepped into the batter’s box. Most of the time, he didn’t feel confident.
“He needed to see success,” said Ben Wolgamot, Troy’s associate head coach, “and he hadn’t seen success at this level.
“He was hard on himself. You could see it in his face, like he was disappointed that he’s not playing well. But also, Jabe really wants to win. I think for him, he knew if he was productive, he could help us win. You could see he was pressing, and that makes hitting that much harder.”
No matter what tweaks he made in the first three months of the season, nothing seemed to work. He tried 10 different batting gloves and hundreds of swings before practice.
In March, he watched video of himself “rocking and rolling,” as Frichter said, in his dominating juco days. It was a seemingly easier time, with maybe 100 people in the stands and long rides on the Enterprise State bus, complete with a large Boll Weevil on the outside.
So in May, and in that series against South Alabama, Boroff had reached the apex of frustration, and he asked the equipment managers for a new bat.
“My bat has no hits in it,” he told them.
They found him another bat — pretty much the same bat, except with a different design. Then Boroff hit a home run, just his second of the season on May 10, and he started stringing together more hits. He went 10-for-20 with four home runs and 12 RBIs in the Gainesville Regional and was named Most Outstanding Player.
The equipment managers joke with Boroff that he should be thanking them, but deep down, they all know that the slightly different bat isn’t the reason he’s succeeding.
“It’s all mental,” Boroff said. “You can trick yourself and say, ‘Oh, it’s the bat, it’s this.’ But you’ve just got to be confident, you know? You can maybe trick yourself into it, too.”
He said his faith got him through the slump, and that his family and his girlfriend would send him Scriptures about God’s plan.
Frichter, who sat with his old players in the stands Friday and marveled at what Boroff had done, left just before 1 o’clock in the afternoon the day before, alone, and arrived in Omaha around 5:30 a.m. But he was wide-eyed once he arrived at the stadium.
“He’s thrust into the spotlight because of the work that he’s put in,” he said, “all the long bus rides in junior college and eating the Uncrustables and oranges instead of the buffets and nice meals that you get at the Division I level.
“It’s guys that love baseball and want to work hard and achieve a goal. That’s why it was so gratifying to see him on that big stage.”
