How Dylan DeLucia willed Ole Miss to the precipice of immortality
An unlikely hero galvanized a team that is two wins away from a national championship.
Dylan DeLucia hurled his glove toward the sky, turned to his left and let out a herculean scream in the direction of a swatch of approaching teammates as they poured out of the first-base dugout at Charles Schwab Field to celebrate both the first College World Series finals appearance in Ole Miss history and the man who willed them there.
Two seconds prior, DeLucia hurled one last 92 mph fastball past a flailing Chris Lanzilli to cement the Rebels’ fate and finish a titan-like performance. The last pitch was one final brush stroke to complete a work of art on the sport’s grandest stage, and it looked like so many others that comprised a 113-pitch masterpiece. In this complete-game, four-hit shutout that featured no walks and just three 3-ball counts, DeLucia made Arkansas look foolish with a slider that froze left-handed hitters in their tracks and enticed right-handed hitters to unsuccessfully swat at as it darted away from the plate. Arkansas could neither decipher his two-seam fastball from the slider nor could the Razorbacks catch up to it. The occasional changeup mixed in made it a futile mission for the losing party.
“It was a legendary performance,” Mike Bianco said.
Tim Elko called it the best performance he’d ever seen given the stakes.
Without Dylan DeLucia, Ole Miss’ pursuit of a championship would’ve long ago fizzled out in a similar fashion as 297 of the 299 clubs that took the field in February. This team’s ascent has been fueled by the junior college transfer from Port Orange, Florida.
In fact, there’s a case to be made that he lit the fuse.
When Ole Miss arrived in Lexington, Kentucky in mid-March, on the heels of a humbling ass-kicking at the hands of Tennessee in their own ballpark — a thrashing that ripped away the façade that the Rebels hid behind, one that was woven by a high preseason ranking and a weak non-conference schedule — a flawed team was in need of a spark.
The starting pitching was in shambles, to the point of 25-year Division-I head coach Mike Bianco abandoning the concept of starting pitching altogether. A smoke-and-mirrors offense that depended on the home run ball like oxygen appeared to be rather toothless. A reeling club needed stability.
In his first-ever Division-I start, DeLucia provided that in the form of 6.1 innings of three-hit baseball in which he allowed zero earned runs, struck out five and walked one. It was the first time an Ole Miss starter had reached the fifth inning in SEC play, a sign of the unsustainable brand of baseball the team was playing. The performance bailed out another mystifying showing from the offense and preserved a 2-1 win that stopped the bleeding. It was a prelude to a string of mesmerizing outings that nearly single-handedly kept a plummeting team afloat as the Rebels lost five of six series, including four in a row, and left Fayetteville, Arkansas with a 7-14 conference record on May 1. Of those seven wins, DeLucia personally recorded four of those decisions. Seemingly at rock bottom in that moment, just three losses from basically being mathematically eliminated from making the NCAA Tournament — and, truthfully a small underdog to even make the SEC Tournament in Hoover — it’s worth asking where would the Rebels have been without DeLucia and how much worse would rock bottom have looked?
DeLucia coming back out for the ninth inning on Thursday, despite his pitch count residing north of 100, was fitting. How many times has that played out this year? DeLucia throws a 100+ pitch gem and gets the encore inning to finish his work and preserve the bullpen for the rest of a weekend series. This is a guy who threw 568 pitches over a five-outing stretch. Was there ever a doubt he was coming back out for the final frame despite teetering on the thin line of being one base runner from being pulled in favor of the dependable Josh Mallitz for three consecutive innings? There may have been a physical altercation or a small riot in the dugout had Bianco tried to sit DeLucia after the 8th inning.
“I just kind of looked up at the scoreboard going into the 8th and saw all of those zeroes,” DeLucia said, “and thought, ‘it’s my time to finally finish this game.’”
Beyond the performances that have at times willed this group to survival, and now, to the precipice of a title, DeLucia’s mindset and the way he carries himself injects a confidence-enhancing stimulant into a team that needed it throughout this season. You, the reader, watched this club all year. When things were going poorly, how starkly different did this team look when DeLucia took the baseball versus the other two days? Weekend series became similar to a movie script you’d seen 100 times. The way DeLucia intertwines stoicism while operating with releasing emotion when the job is done — much like he did the moment that last 92 mph fastball hit Hayden Dunhurst’s mitt — is the recipe to that confidence prescription.
Because DeLucia played the role of a life raft during what this team now commonly refers to as a “rough patch in the middle” of its season, when things finally came together for this gifted yet confounding group, it wasn’t too little too late. And it paved the runway for this team to take flight. It was a steep climb that required an 8-2 finish to the regular season that included a sweep of LSU in Baton Rouge, just to get to the NCAA Tournament as the last team in the field.
That final stand from a desperate club, striving to atone for three months of squandered opportunity and extend the time it had together, eventually snowballed into what has become a vigorous vindication tour.
The manner in which the Rebels have barreled through the 2022 postseason on their way to the pinnacle of the sport is astonishing to many.
The dominance is staggering. Before Wednesday’s 3-2 loss, Ole Miss was the only team in the field that had yet to lose a game in the NCAA Tournament. The Rebels have outscored opponents 68-20 and out-hit them 89-52. The bullpen covered 20 scoreless innings before allowing its first earned runs of the postseason when Brandon Johnson allowed an inconsequential two-run home run to Peyton Stovall in the ninth inning of Monday’s win over the Razorbacks. The pitching staff as a whole entered that game having only given up one earned run in its last 32 innings. Ole Miss has stifled good offenses and broken quality pitchers in a run that’s resembled a bulldozer clearing a pathway.
But one thing this remarkable tear is not? Inexplicable.
It isn’t unthinkable that this team was capable of reaching the College World Series. It isn’t shocking that this offense has mostly obliterated opposing pitching staffs. And while it’s surprising that the pitching staff has become borderline elite, Bianco’s track record of seemingly always figuring out how to field a competitive pitching staff makes it far from inconceivable. It just took him longer to sift toward discovering the gems that Elliott and DeLucia have become.
The season’s start and end points will ultimately make sense, regardless of a win or loss in the national championship series. Think about it like this: what was your opinion of this team in February? An elite offense that will terrorize an SEC devoid of frontline starting pitching, and a pitching staff littered with question marks but armed with enough talent to form a competitive unit. If someone told you in February that this is what Elliott and DeLucia would become, wouldn’t you have believed the Rebels would have a great chance to win the whole thing? Of course you would have thought that. Again, this all makes sense, in a way.
It’s the path Ole Miss took from start to end, and the manner in which the cogs meshed to form this machine, that generates the mesmerizing sense of awe that accompanies watching all of this unfold. Everything this team was supposed to be — but wasn’t for three months — has surfaced in this postseason run. Ole Miss beat quality arms like Miami’s Carson Palmquist (a lefty no less), Southern Miss’ Hunter Waldrep and Tanner Hall, and Arkansas ace Connor Noland. The offense consistently applied pressure until the best arms opponents had to offer eventually wilted —even in games that weren’t great overall performances like the wins over Palmquist and Noland.
The Rebels found a way to win tough, one-run contests like the 2-1 win over Miami in the winner’s bracket game that made this entire journey realistic — games in which a single misplaced pitch or defensive gaffe changes the trajectory of seasons and alters legacies.
Ole Miss finally showed a resiliency that lacked in March and April. The Rebels entered the postseason 0-16 in games in which they trailed after six innings. Ole Miss erased two deficits of that variety in its first two postseason contests against Arizona and the Hurricanes. Pushed to the brink, a team that became known for letting opportunity slip from its grasp has more often than not returned with its best punch.
This run has also been fueled by Ole Miss’ stars, some more obvious than others.
We wouldn’t be having this discussion today if not for Peyton Chatagnier’s 4-RBI explosion in the first game of the regional against Arizona. Without Elko’s 7th-inning, go-ahead double against Miami, the Rebels likely fade in the loser’s bracket of the Coral Gables Regional. Elliott’s dominant outings against Miami and Southern Miss cemented his status as a superstar. The freshman became an unlikely hero whose legendary postseason work has powered Ole Miss to a College World Series berth, Kevin Graham going 5-9 in Hattiesburg Super Regional removed all doubt in both wins. Justin Bench’s four-hit night on Monday catalyzed a drubbing that pulled Ole Miss within one win of playing for a national championship.
Without every aforementioned moment and performance, Ole Miss likely has a new baseball coach today and looks like a drastically different program searching for the answers as to why it cannot reach the summit it has now reached.
And of course, at the epicenter of all of that is DeLucia, as has been the case for the entirety of this team’s journey. He’s allowed one earned run over his last 22.1 innings. In the College World Series, DeLucia has struck out 17 hitters and has not issued a walk. Beyond the gaudy statistics, perhaps the most invaluable element DeLucia brings to this team is what was reflected in each of the last two games. On the heels of a deflating 3-2 Wednesday loss to the Razorbacks in which Ole Miss left the tying run on third base and the winning run on second base in the ninth inning, how the Rebels would respond psychologically was as fair of a question as any. That defeat was a gut punch considering what was at stake.
“We were pretty down after last night,” Bianco said. “To be able to bounce back and play like this in another tough game, was huge. Nobody said this was going to be easy. Some of what happened in April toughened us, weathered us to be able to bounce back today.”
Without DeLucia, those April struggles would’ve written this team’s obituary. Instead, those hardships shaped their resolve and provided this team with a chance to rectify them. Ole Miss could have lost on Thursday. But it was never going to lose because it was lethargic, flat, scarred or tight. DeLucia’s mere presence wouldn’t allow it. That intangible shot of confidence he administers to a team on the verge of immortality immunized them from succumbing to their struggles.
“Loosh (DeLucia) was spectacular,” Chatagnier said. “We knew all we needed was one run. We scratched two and we shut the door down. He’s the man.”
DeLucia’s glove sailed downward back toward the grass as he turned toward his dugout and released an emotional roar, addressing a group of men he’s galvanized and a team he’s awoken as the Rebels soar toward a championship that was never attainable without him.
Excellent article.