OXFORD — You can give Taylor Rabe a lot of the credit for Tristan Bissetta’s decision to play his final college season at Ole Miss.
Rabe and Bissetta are both from Greenville, South Carolina and played at rival high schools, Greenville Senior and JL Mann, respectively. While Rabe is a sophomore pitcher and blossoming young star, Bissetta is a senior who began his college career at Clemson. Bissetta redshirted as a freshman with the Tigers but became a starter as a sophomore, hitting .298 with seven home runs and 34 RBIs. He suffered through a series of injuries after that, tearing the labrum in his non-throwing shoulder heading into his junior year, having bone spurs removed in his wrist months before his junior season began before ultimately tearing the ulnar collateral ligament in his throwing arm last April while pitching.
Bissetta needed a change of scenery for his final go-around in college baseball.
Bissetta was initially being recruited by Duke and then Virginia once the Blue Devils’ staff left for Charlottesville. Rabe used to train with Bissetta in South Carolina and, upon learning Bissetta was entering the transfer portal, reached out to his friend as well as assistant coach Carl Lafferty.
Coaches could do the scouting they needed to on Bissetta’s tape as a player, but Rabe could vouch for who he was as a person.
“I will be forever grateful for him for just doing that,” Bissetta said.
Fast forward to now, and all parties are happy things worked out the way they did.
Bissetta has 23 home runs this season — one away from tying Tim Elko for the single-season school record — and is a key cog on a Rebels (41-21) team that has gotten hot just like it did four years ago. After senior Will Furniss’ two-run home run gave the Rebels an eighth inning lead in Saturday’s super regional matchup at Auburn, Bissetta’s towering home run, subsequent bat flip and celebration rounding the bases put the icing on an Omaha-sized cake that clinched the program’s seventh College World Series berth.
The Rebels begin College World Series play against North Carolina on Friday at 6 p.m. The game will be broadcast on ESPN.
“I cried,” Bissetta’s mother, Julie, said of the home run. “I wasn’t expecting it. I don’t know that you ever expect it. You hope for it. But that was not even in my wheelhouse.”
Origins of a sweet swing
Bissetta started out as a swimmer. But from his earliest swings with a wiffle ball bat, baseball had his heart.
He was in the pool by the time he was six weeks old, Julie said. He swam competitively in the summers and won a pair of state championships in high school. But Julie distinctly remembers coming home from work one day and seeing her mother instructing a young Bissetta on how to hit a baseball.
“I came home from work to pick Tristan up one day, and there he was in the backyard with my mother with a yellow plastic whiffle ball bat,” Julie said. “And she had him switch hitting.”
Bissetta said he started taking baseball lessons when he was 7 or 8 and began doing the travel ball circuit. He focused solely on baseball after his sophomore year of high school and began focusing on gaining mass and perfecting his diet. He estimates he was about 5-foot-9, 140 pounds when he got to high school and was 6-feet, 200 pounds by his sophomore year.
“I could hit the ball and I had decent power already. So the decision was, well I’m not fast right now and I’m not that big either. So I need to either get bigger and stronger or work on speed. And I chose to get bigger and stronger,” Bissetta said with a laugh.
Bissetta starred at JL Mann and was named the region and Greenville News Male Athlete of the Year a senior after hitting 10 home runs in just 29 games. He took his talents about 45 minutes southwest to Clemson, where he redshirted his first season. He started three games as a redshirt freshman and 36 as a redshirt sophomore and helped the Tigers reach the super regionals.
If you’re curious about that powerful swing of Bissetta’s, know that a lot of work has gone into its current iteration. Bissetta was struggling his first season at Clemson and worked on perfecting his bat path. He tinkered with it meticulously, he said, and models it after a certain seven-time MLB MVP.
“It’s Barry Bonds,” Bissetta said. “ … But there’s a lot of hitters out there who are in the Hall of Fame that do similar things. So, that’s kind of where that goes.”
“It was magic”
After his successful sophomore season, injuries began taking their toll on Bissetta. He started just 19 games last season for the Tigers, battling through shoulder and wrist injuries. During the first game of a double-header against Georgia Tech, Bissetta said coaches asked him if he could “eat an inning” in a blowout in order to preserve pitching for Game 2. He pitched a scoreless frame against Georgia Tech and began life as a pitcher. Bissetta eventually before tore his UCL and required Tommy John’s surgery.
“It just kind of put a damper on the experience at Clemson,” Bissetta said. “ … That situation and a weird year of playing time after being the everyday starter was kind of what led me to enter the portal.”
Bissetta entered the portal in the offseason and began receiving interest from programs, including Duke. Duke’s staff was later hired at Virginia, and Julie said the Cavaliers tried to take her son with them. That’s when Rabe stepped reached out to Bissetta to try and get a lay of the land.
“(Rabe) said, ‘I’m sitting down here in Clem’s office … and would you be interested in looking at Ole Miss?’ And Tristan said, ‘My God, are you kidding me?’” Julie recounted. “Within, I don’t know, 12 hours, they had booked our plane tickets.”
Bissetta, who had just gotten the brace off his throwing arm, took just one visit to Oxford and knew it was where he needed to be. The coaches were clear of their larger plan — that they were taking another outfielder, which wound up being Illinois State’s Daniel Pacella, and were moving Hayden Federico to centerfield. There were also no guarantees on playing time. He appreciated the coaching staff’s honesty and transparency, he said.
The lure of playing in an SEC stadium with more than 10,000 fans was also hard to pass up.
“He said, ‘So Tristan, what do you think?’ And Tristan said, ‘Coach, I want to play for you.’” Julie said. “And he said ‘That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear.’ … I mean, it was magic.”
“The perfect feeling”
Transfers don’t always merge into teams seamlessly, particularly on a squad that already had a handful of sage veterans to begin with. But Bissetta made his impact felt immediately, Ole Miss coach Mike Bianco said.
“The numbers speak for themselves, obviously. … But it’s bigger than that,” Bianco said. “ … What a neat kid he is. What a great teammate. … Part of the reason you have this camaraderie, this teamsmanship, is the transfers that do get here. And he’s not the first — and not the only one on this team — but to buy into what we’re doing.
“ … To just kind of immerse himself into the team, that makes a difference. … He’s respected. … He embraced it, he came in here and wanted to be a part of it. And, of course, he’s respected as a baseball player. But when you act like that, it makes a difference in the clubhouse (and) in the dugout.”
Camaraderie has been discussed at length with the 2026 Rebels — their desire for more bus rides and the Star Wars stormtrooper helmet home run celebration are indicators of a group that truly enjoys being with itself. Those bonds partially started during the devastating ice storms in Oxford this winter, when much of the city was without power for the better part of two weeks in January. That included Bissetta, whose house was approximately 30 degrees, and several of his new teammates. Sophomore closer Walker Hooks opened his home up to 10 or so teammates and offered up “a freezer full of meat.”
“You enjoy each other’s presence, and you’re making memories and laughing. It’s just bonding,” Bissetta said. “But what you do learn is that you have each other’s backs, and you’re willing to go beyond what you usually would do to make sure everybody’s taken care of.”
Ole Miss has ridden its talent and tight-knit bond all the way to Omaha, where the Rebels hope to make a similar run to what Elko and company accomplished in 2022. Along the way, lifelong bonds have been made for the rest of Bissetta family as well.
Bissetta’s father Jack and Julie have been to nearly all of their son’s games this year and are smitten with Oxford. So much so, Julie says, that she plans on being at games next year when her son is no longer on the team. Julie is also part of a group chat with several of the mothers on the team, which she affectionately calls “The Hotty Toddy Mamas.”
Bissetta isn’t necessarily surprised by what he’s accomplished this year. He does, however, admit it’s a nearly perfect story of serendipitous happenstances.
“I knew I was capable of having success on the field. I wouldn’t have taken the chances in my career if I didn’t think that. And I knew this team was capable,” Bissetta said. “To say that I’m surprised would probably be a lie, because we have so many good pieces on this team and the team chemistry is great. But we have some of the key pieces you need to go on a run.”
Bissetta’s towering home run and bat flip at Auburn — visualization is crucial in baseball, he said, and even the bat flip was part of that process — was “the perfect feeling, and you try to bottle that up and relive it as much as you can.” You keep replaying it, Bissetta said, so it becomes habit.
Furniss’ and Bissetta’s home runs — combined with some continued clutch pitching from a Rebels bullpen that has been stellar all postseason — led to an all-time celebration from Ole Miss players and coaches at Plainsman Park.
It was also a perfect birthday gift for Julie.
“I celebrated my birthday (Monday),” Julie said. “So I texted him after the game, I was like, ‘You gave me the best birthday present of a lifetime.’”
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