UC Irvine’s loss a reminder of the pain of last-play defeats

It’s a common scene in sports: players on one team sprinting toward a dog pile while their opponents stand speechless with their hands on their hips.

Such was the case earlier this week when UC Irvine lost a heartbreaker to Virginia in the super regionals of the College World Series. The Anteaters were one strike from a trip to Omaha, before the Cavaliers rallied for two hits, a walk and one final single that sent UC Irvine home for the summer.

One camera angle caught Irvine ace Matt Summers halfway to the dugout with his hands on his head, just as the game-winning runner slid home. And even two days later, a school official would not grant player interviews because the team remained so traumatized.

“You can picture that moment,” Irvine’s D.J. Crumlich said at a mandatory postgame news conference. “You dream about it as a little kid. One strike away is tough.”

It’s so tough that athletes sometimes wonder whether it might be better to lose by 100 than one, to get blown out rather than falling in the final seconds. Those are two different types of pain — one that results from utter embarrassment, the other from frustration at thinking the team had it won.

Naturally, the more important the game, the bigger the hurt, and in the heat of the moment, athletes will often say they’d rather get crushed than lose a close one. But in the next breath, they say that they are proud of the way their team competed.

So, psychologically speaking, what is the best way to lose?

Dodgers teammates Rod Barajas and Jamey Carroll disagree.

“As a competitor, you want to be in every game,” Barajas said. “You don’t want to go out there and feel like the team you played against is that much better than you. That’s not a good feeling.”

But neither, says Carroll, is losing on the last out. The Dodgers shortstop can still recall losing by a single run in both the American Legion World Series and a Junior College World Series, and it pains him even now.

“It hurts so much that you would have rather lost by 20,” Carroll said. “And it definitely stings a little bit more because you really look at every aspect of the game and try to see where you could have gained that run or given them that run.”

Sports psychologists are quick to say that individual athletes have different traits, which helps explain the difference in opinion. But John Callaghan, an expert in the field at USC, agrees with Barajas. He said that true competitors hate getting blown out.

“The ones who aren’t very good, a blowout is a blowout and that’s it,” Callaghan said. “They pack their bags and want to get on with their lives. But I think the real competitors among us want to fight to the bitter end.”

Andrew Yellen, a practicing Northridge-based sports psychologist, agrees. Yellen coached football and swimming for 15 years at Grant High School, and said nothing is worse than the despondency that results from an uncompetitive contest.

“If you’re blown out, what that means is, for whatever reason, you’re not able to perform up to your absolute best,” he said. “That would be distressing. … I think it’s much more difficult to try to deal with, ‘Why did I just absolutely abysmally fall on my face?’”

As with any complicated question, the answer is more complex than a simple binary.

In either case, a loss can generate anxiety. Callaghan said that the proper amount of anxiety can enhance performance, but too much may create catastrophe.

Perhaps the most famous local example of such catastrophe is Donnie Moore, the Angels pitcher who is often associated with the team’s loss in the 1986 American League Championship Series.

The Angels were one out from their first trip to the World Series, and Moore came in with one man on to halt a ninth-inning rally. Instead, he gave up a two-run home run to give the Red Sox a 6-5 lead. Though the Angels would tie it in the bottom of the ninth, the Red Sox scored off Moore again in the 11th to seal a 7-6 victory. Moore was booed by Angels fans into the next season, and he committed suicide three years later. Some consider it overly simplistic to tie Moore’s death directly to the 1986 ALCS.

“I think that if an individual was pointedly the goat of a game at a really high moment, it would take a strong person to fight through that and bounce back,” said Bobby Grich, a teammate of Moore’s on that 1986 squad. “In Donnie Moore’s case, I think there were a lot of other factors in his life that were bothering Donnie, unfortunately. He had a number of problems. That was just one of them.”

Nonetheless, Grich said that the Game 5 loss was “by far” the hardest of his career. Grich said it took him five days to start seeing the game from a rational perspective. Though he too would prefer a tight, competitive game to a blowout, he said it’s hard to think that way in the moments following a walk-off.

“It hits you like a ton of bricks,” Grich said. “You’re in heavy depression mode. You don’t want to see anybody, you don’t want to talk to anybody for some period of time. I just became recluse and distant [after Game 5] and I just didn’t want to answer the phone. That sets in for a few days, and then gradually over time, you get over it.”

Moore’s blown save did not decide the series. The Angels had two more chances to clinch. But when they failed to do so, Moore became the scapegoat.

The opposite happened to Barajas. The Dodgers catcher was on the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks team that won it all despite two blown saves from closer Byung-Hyun Kim. Like Moore, Kim gave up a two-run home run with two outs in the ninth, and then eventually allowed the game-winning run in extra innings. One night later, Kim gave up another game-tying two-run home run with two outs in the ninth and the Yankees won in the 12th inning.

Unlike Moore’s Angels, the Diamondbacks would go on to win it all. And unlike Moore, Kim bounced back the next season to set the team’s season record for saves and make his only career appearance in the All-Star game.

Barajas said that rather than demoralizing the group, the two tightly contested losses reassured his upstart team that it was just as good as the Yankees.

“In that situation, we still felt like we were outplaying the Yankees and we were confident,” he said. “We knew what we had coming with Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling. We knew we were at the top of our game and we were going to be OK.”

One thing on which athletes and coaches agree is regardless of outcome, they love to play in a nail-biter.

Aaron Miles of the Dodgers followed UC Irvine in the NCAA baseball playoffs, and said he’s confident as painful as the loss was, players will prefer it to a blowout when they look back years from now.

“I think every one of them will draw pride that it was a close game and that during the game they were in it,” he said.

“There’s no redeeming value in 15-0.”

matthew.stevens@latimes.com

twitter.com/MattStevensLAT