UCLA: A Young Team Cruising Through the College World Series

Casual fans of college baseball might take a look at the average age or grade of the UCLA Bruins roster and be surprised that they are cruising through the postseason.

But those that have watched the Bruins all of the last two seasons agree with coach John Savage that, while young, the roster has already gone through the same ringer many other teams have.

UCLA (48-16) won its first CWS game Saturday against Murray State since winning the 2013 national championship. The Bruins were even younger last season and went 19-33.

As Savage detailed after their 6-4 win over the Racers, last season bred them for what is a stellar run this season.

"Got good, young players. We've got to keep them. We've got to hold on to them," Savage said. "Gotta keep on retaining them. They're very good players. We wore it last year; we clearly did. We did not win many games last year. I didn't think we were going to win as few as we did.

"But at the end of the day, it's paid off. We played a lot of guys that probably weren't quite ready -- Dean West did not play very much last year. He was hurt. Dean played the last weekend of the year, I think got on base 11 times against Stanford. He has one of the best hand-eye coordination in the country, best zone disciplines in the country. Phenomenal player. He didn't play very much last year because of injury. Roch [Cholowsky] played a lot. Roman [Martin] played quite a bit. Phoenix [Call] played a little bit. Cash[el Dugger] played quite a bit."

Many of the players Savage mentioned are sophomores and were playing their freshman seasons when they won just 19 games, getting a ton of reps. Savage says it's all paying off now.

"We're kind of getting the payoff now, clearly," he said. "And I don't like to say that we're young. I said this in the press conference a couple of days ago, a lot of these guys have played over 100 Division I games, 115 Division I games. You can't play the young card too much. I think that's a mistake. Good, young players that are coming into their own, you can talk about that, but you see a lot of sophomores. I'm sure you guys saw that little thing that went out. We have 37 kind of homegrown players that we recruited. So right now, it's a pretty good formula. Last year, it wasn't a great formula. So it evolves and anything good takes time."