ARLINGTON – Evan Longoria has waited 15 years to win another World Series title.
Now that the veteran third baseman/designated hitter returns to the game’s biggest stage when his D-backs face the Rangers in the 2023 World Series, he feels far more prepared to win a ring than he was 23-year-old did rookie with the Rays in ’08.
The biggest difference this time?
Longoria isn’t taking a “dumb” approach to Friday’s first game.
“As a young player, I truly believed that the way to win was to score every time I got up there,” Longoria said Thursday at Globe Life Field. “That’s the kind of pressure I put on myself. For example: ‘If I don’t play well in this series, we won’t win.’
“Looking back, that’s obviously a stupid thought.”
There is no doubt that the pressure was too much for him at the time.
Longoria had an outstanding performance in the 2008 American League Championship Series, driving in eight runs, scoring eight more and hitting a home run in four straight games as Tampa Bay swept Boston in seven games.
But under the bright lights of the World Series, Longoria retreated into the shadows.
In the first four games of the 2008 Fall Classic against the Phillies, he went 0-for-16 with nine strikeouts. Longoria’s only hit — an RBI single in the Rays’ decisive loss in Game 5 — was far too little, too late to save Tampa Bay.
“As a young player, I just had all this pressure and burden,” Longoria said, “and I really felt like the stadium was collapsing on me.”
A young player would most likely never make such an admission at the moment. But Longoria’s openness and willingness to share his own experiences might now help another 23-year-old rookie: D-backs superstar Corbin Carroll.
“I talked to him several times over the course of the postseason about not treating it any differently,” Longoria said. “Hopefully he took some of that to heart.”
It’s safe to say Carroll was listening.
“Whatever happens, happens,” Carroll said on the eve of the World Series. “I’m just going to go out there and do my best. All I can control is my effort, my process and all the work I put in.”
As for Longoria revealing his personal expectations in his first World Series, Carroll seems to agree with Longoria’s harsh “stupid” assessment.
“As for Longo, I think he said he hadn’t scored until then [fifth] “He felt like the world was falling apart,” Carroll said. “But to be honest, we laughed about it a little bit because when you go a few games in the regular season without scoring, that’s just how it is. “It’s going to turn around. We have to treat it the same way.”
Carroll has already put that lesson to good use this postseason. After going just 3 for 23 (.130) without an extra base hit or stolen base in the first six games of Arizona’s NLCS win over the Phillies, Carroll stole the show in Game 7. He went 3 for 4 with two RBIs and two stolen bases to help the D-Backs clinch the pennant.
Longoria has the full support of his manager in conducting these chats.
“It was probably a first-day conversation in my office where I gave him free rein to do whatever he needed to do,” Torey Lovullo said. “… Conversations he can have when I’m not there are much more impactful than anything another teammate or another coach could have because of that [his] Call. And he hasn’t stopped doing it.”
That’s why Longoria didn’t hesitate to remind all of his teammates — not just the freshmen — that no single player will be able to lead Arizona to a title. The 2023 World Series will not be won or lost on any pitch or hit – or even on a single game.
Longoria’s original vision of how to win a World Series — “It was imagined that the best way to win was to lead the team,” he recalled — didn’t work 15 years ago.
“The vision of how we win this series is a lot clearer in my head,” Longoria said. “Now we just have to go out and actually do it. We have to go out and execute what we’ve done all year.”
“But I firmly believe that we can do it and that we can do it.”