A coach at any level has to know the essentials: teach, lead and argue calls. Not even a live interview stopped TCU baseball coach Kirk Saarloos from doing just that on Tuesday. While the Horned Frogs coach was in the dugout during his team’s College World Series matchup with Oral Roberts, duty called.
Saarloos was in the middle of an interview with the ESPN broadcast team in the top of the fifth inning when he could have sworn that he witnessed a missed balk. Without skipping a beat, he told the broadcast team, “Hey, I’ll be right back guys. Let me dunk ’em.”
"Well, you guys tell me...do I need to be upset when I go back out there...or he got it right?" 😂 pic.twitter.com/gd3aYnCm9u
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) June 20, 2023
The TCU coach immediately went to the umpire and inquired about what was going on. But upon replay, the pitcher didn’t appear to commit a balk, and the broadcast team agreed. Nevertheless, Saarloos wanted confirmation to make sure there was nothing that warranted a temper tantrum.
“Well, you guys tell me,” he told the broadcast team. “Do I need to be upset when I go back out there?”
Before that sequence, the same Oral Roberts pitcher, Joshua Caravalho, already had committed a balk that gave TCU a 2–0 lead. The Horned Frogs went on to win, 6–1.
TCU scored its second run of the game after a balk was called on Oral Roberts pitcher Joshua Caravalho. pic.twitter.com/T0MimnDA4H
— ESPN (@espn) June 20, 2023