Change drives success as ASU takes series over LMU

Stubbornness keeps you stuck. Adjustment keeps you alive.

Friday felt like the first real sign that Arizona State is willing to change when it has to. Head coach Willie Bloomquist shifted the weekend rotation, moving senior right-hander Kole Klecker to Sunday, but the real change came Saturday: junior right-hander Alex Overbay, who closed games at UNLV last season and had never started a career game, was handed the ball.

Bloomquist has praised the depth of his staff all season, and Friday was the first time it played out in a real spot. Overbay fit the opportunity, having already thrown the most length of any ASU reliever with three separate 3 IP+ outings. The move from reliever to starter felt less like a gamble and more like the next adjustment for a team still figuring itself out. Whether it sticks long term is unknown, but the role is his for now.

The changes didn’t stop on the mound. The lineup looked different, too, but the results felt familiar. The night quickly turned into the kind of game Phoenix Municipal was built for: lights flickering, “Hey Baby” playing, and the ball carrying a little farther than usual.

ASU hit three home runs, including a 461-foot blast from sophomore outfielder Landon Hairston that became the second-longest home run in Muni history. The Sun Devils piled up six extra-base hits and rode the long ball to a nine-run night at the plate. On the other side, the pitching nearly made the offense unnecessary. Overbay set the tone with four scoreless innings and five strikeouts, and the bullpen followed with clean inning after clean inning. LMU did not score until the ninth as ASU used six different arms to finish off a 9-1 win, another example that for this team, adjustment is not a weakness. It is the plan.

With No. 17 TCU coming to Tempe next weekend to open conference play, this series feels like the last chance for Bloomquist to experiment. Roles are still moving, spots are still open, and consistency is hard to find without a consistent lineup or a set weekend script on the mound. Saturday showed a little more of both, even if the order is still not final.

“You’d like to see guys step up and start getting defined roles, especially going into conference,” Bloomquist said. “If starters give five or six innings consistently, and we define the back end, it starts coming together.”

Graduate outfielder Dean Toigo is the clearest example. The UNLV transfer and 2025 Mountain West co-player of the year opened the season hitting near the top of the order, but the production has come in waves. He entered Saturday hitless in three of his last five starts and found himself batting seventh after beginning the year in the three spot. 

The drop might be where he fits. 

A similar move earlier this season paid off against No. 19 Tennessee, when he slid down the order and responded with three hits and an RBI double. Saturday brought another spark. Toigo crushed ASU’s first home run of the night, driving an offspeed pitch 414 feet to right field for his fourth of the season. It was a long one, just not the longest of the night.

An inning later, junior outfielder Dominic Longo followed the same theme. Early in the year he looked like part of a center field rotation, learning a position he had never played in college. Now he looks like a lineup fixture. Longo entered Saturday with a .512 on-base percentage and has climbed as high as the three spot in the order as the season has gone on. 

He said Friday his focus has been getting the ball in the air, and the numbers back it up. More than half of his balls in play have been fly balls, and more than a quarter of those have left the yard. The approach worked again in the third, when he lifted a middle-away curveball into deep right center for his fifth home run of the season and another early cushion for ASU.

The game followed a familiar script from there, quiet early, then slowly pulling away, which gave Overbay a chance to show both why the staff trusts him and why the role is still new. He looked like the dominant reliever ASU has leaned on through the first two innings, striking out two and allowing just one base runner. 

“It felt great. It’s kind of something I’ve been working toward coming into this year,” Overbay said. “Me and Jeremy talked all fall about adding that third pitch, the changeup, and I think that was the biggest thing…Just facing batters more than one time—before, it was just one or two innings, facing each batter probably once. So having that third pitch, or even four pitches, just takes it to the next level.”

The third inning stretched longer. Two singles and a walk loaded the bases before he escaped with a groundout. The fourth was similar, a hit by pitch and a walk putting runners on again before a flyout ended the threat. Bloomquist let him try the fifth, but a leadoff double ended the experiment at 62 pitches and four innings.

The bullpen took over from there. Sophomore right-hander Taylor Penn struck out two and got a lineout to escape the jam, then added another strikeout in his second inning. Through 9.1 innings this season, Penn has 11 strikeouts and has quietly become one of Bloomquist’s most reliable arms when a game starts to shift.

Once the pitching settled, the offense took over. In the sixth inning, hits came in waves, exactly the kind of approach Bloomquist prefers, using base knocks to build momentum rather than swinging for the fences.

“We started taking our hits to the middle of the field. We weren’t trying to spin off homers,” Bloomquist said. “They weren’t loud, but they were hits. That’s how you start rallies…You’re not always going to run into homers. Put guys on base and good things happen.”

Junior infielder Nu’u Contrades singled in a run for his second RBI of the night, junior infielder Garrett Michel doubled off the top of the wall in left center, Toigo added another RBI single, and sophomore Beckett Zavorek ripped a triple into the right center gap, sliding into third with a grin as the game broke open.

Then came the exclamation point. Hairston stepped in during the eighth in what had been a rare quiet night for the leadoff man. He sat on a fastball and did not miss, launching a moonshot 461 feet into deep right center. The blast tied his home run total from last season in 40 fewer games and became the second-longest homer in Phoenix Municipal history, trailing only Brandon Compton. Not bad company, and a fitting finish on a night built on change.

Even as the scoreboard reflected success, the veterans know there’s still work to do. Nitpicking the good days to get better is a hallmark of a team that’s never satisfied.

“There’s always ways to improve,” Toigo said. “I’m never satisfied. It’s baseball. (The Amergy Series) was three games. Hop back on the horse the next game and go get the job done.”