1986 National Champions

By Tom Ensey -- Troy SID (1979-97)

It was midnight. And baseball was still being played.

On May 23, 1986, in the opening round of the NCAA Division II Baseball Championship Finals, Troy State trailed Mankato State, 6-4, in the top of the ninth. The game hadn’t even started until 9:15 p.m. The afternoon contest, a 14-12 Sacramento State win over Tampa, had dragged on for three hours. Then, the between-game ceremonies ran overtime, pressing everything back against this moment, this unlikely hour.

Midnight, bases loaded, one out: Troy third baseman Wendell Stephens at bat with an 0-2 count and a national championship in the balance. Forget that there was even one out. Stephens was Troy’s big gun, the team home run leader, school record holder for RBI in a season and career. He was The Man. This was it.

Forget, too, that the crowd of 6,280 had dwindled to 2,000 or so. The diehards who remained shook the stadium with every pitch, yelling from their hearts. It was like one throbbing, swelling voice that offered up a roaring prayer for deliverance. Stephens had fouled off four straight pitches into that thunder. He and Mankato reliever Scott Toop were locked in a war of wills as if nothing else matter. And nothing else did matter. Not in that stadium, at midnight.

Toop checked, rocked, fired. Fastball. Stephens’ bat flashed, cracked and the center fielder never turned around to watch it go. Toop sank to his knees. That ball was long gone, deep into the night, deep into the kudzu that grew thick on the steep clay bank rising behind the 380 sign in Montgomery’s Paterson Field. A grand slam. Unreal.

“When I saw it go out,” Stephens said later. “I thought, ‘Okay, now we can win it.’”

He meant the tournament -- the national championship that had eluded four previous Trojan teams. And while the tournament was far from over, there was still that ringing home run, struck at midnight. That sudden, improbably dramatic instant in which the wish became real, frozen in time and echoing in the mind like destiny.

Today, with the gold trophy securely encased in the lobby of the Tine Davis Field House, the rest of the 1986 NCAA Division II Baseball Championship Finals seems strangely distant and anticlimactic. But there were other moments, many individual efforts combined, and many hearts fused into the force that forged a shared dream in to the reality of that trophy.

Remember Troy State’s tough little lefty, Ron Warren, tired but bearing down in the last three innings of his last college game, a 7-5 win over valiant New Haven. He protected that two-run lead with every molecule in his body. (Before the game, before Warren trotted off to the bullpen to take his warmup, a friend had said, “Little Man, I hope you have one more left in you.” Warren replied, “Big Man, how many do you want?”)

Remember Jody Ryan’s complete game. A 9-1 win over heavyhitting Sacramento State. Ryan got the start on a hunch by coach Chase Riddle. On a lastminute lineup change, Ryan took the ball and went out to complete his up-and-down, injury-plagued, roller coaster college career as he scattered nine hits. He teetered on the brink of disaster for nine full innings, but always found the right pitch to get out of trouble.

Remember Mike Perez and his masterful one-hit shutout of Columbus College in the championship game, which had been delayed a day by rain. The contest was finally played in a persistent, gentle drizzle on a threatening night with the faraway rumble of distant thunder.

Perez fell into a trancelike rhythm that a 26-minute rain delay in the fourth and a line drive taken to his thigh in the eighth could not undo. The Trojan batters gave him five runs, more than enough that evening. Perez threw just 80 pitches -- 54 strikes in nine innings. He retired the last 11 men in order while striking out the last two. Then, leaping into the arms of his catcher, Todd Englett, Perez thrust his redoubtable right arm high into the air in triumph.

Wendell Stephens’ ninth inning Grand Slam in the first game of the 1986 NCAA Division II World Series propelled Troy State to its first national title in baseball.

Front Row: Todd Englett, Jim Prewitt, Warren Arrington, Mart Smartt, Jose Torres, David Hanselman, Richard Pope. Second Row: Tim Brown, Jody Ryan, Scott Baldwin, Vince Kindred, Bobby DeJarnette, Antoine Eddington, Tom Voiland, Ron Warren, Greg Frady, Steve Ellis. Third Row: Mike Russell, Ed Nix, Bill Wolf, Mike Elmore, Jude Rinaldi, Bruce Rowland, David Bond, Chris Small, Ed Black, Wendell Stephens, Mike Perez, head coach Chase Riddle. And Riddle, with every line on his weathered face aglow, put the championship into perspective. His baseball career had spanned five decades, beginning in 1942 when he signed his first professional contract at 17 in his hometown of Columbus, Ga. As he stood in the midst of the celebration, Riddle cradled the trophy he had yearned for since returning to his alma mater as coach eight years before. He watched his young national champions cheering wildly. “Just look at those kids’ faces,” Riddle said, his voice cracking. “That’s what it’s all about. That’s what you do it for.”