There have been walk-off wake-up calls against Arizona State and UC Irvine, balk-off backbreakers in extra innings at UCLA and humbling three-game sweeps at the hands of rival Oregon.
But of all the late-game heartache the Oregon State baseball team has been subjected to this season, Sunday offered perhaps the most painful and punitive setback of them all.
A controversial base-running blunder, a four-run eighth inning and a ninth-inning bloop single led to a crushing 6-5 loss against the Arizona Wildcats for the Beavers in their final home game of the season at Goss Stadium.
“Sometimes, you’re going to get punched in the face,” OSU coach Mitch Canham said. “And you’ve got to be able to respond and not mope about it.”
But Sunday’s brutal knockout offered plenty of motivation for moping.
It looked like the Beavers were cruising toward perhaps their most impressive and important victory of the season through seven innings, as starter Jake Pfennigs was dealing on the mound, OSU’s offense was humming at the plate and the Wildcats’ conference championship hopes were on the ropes.
When the red-hot Wade Meckler stepped to the plate with runners on second and third and two outs in the bottom of the seventh, the Beavers’ boasted a 5-1 lead and were looking for a little insurance. Meckler promptly crushed a double to right field, scoring Justin Boyd and Jake Dukart to extend their lead to six runs.
Or so it seemed.
As Meckler rounded first base on the way to second, Arizona players erupted from the dugout and pointed toward the infield, shouting that he had stepped over the bag. First base umpire Randy Sutton concurred and, as Meckler stood on second base, he was called out. Meckler and Canham vehemently protested, but after a brief meeting among the umpires, the call stood.
Replays shown on the Pac-12 Network were inconclusive, but Meckler told teammates and coaches he had no doubt he touched the bag.
“He was 100% certain that he was getting a good part of the base,” Canham said. “Really, he’s the only one that knows. He was the one down there running, and everybody else was either in the dugout or in the coach’s box. But he was absolutely positive that he touched the base. And you can tell just by the way you slide into second base. Usually if a guy misses it, he kind of hesitates or checks back or something like that. But we don’t have replay, so we don’t know.”
The stunning call erased two runs for the Beavers, trimming their lead from six to four heading into the eighth inning. More importantly, it seemed to have an emotional impact.
After cruising for seven innings — holding the potent Wildcats lineup to just one run and four hits — Pfennigs was touched up with back-to-back-to-back singles to start the inning. The third one shot up the middle off the bat of Nik McClaughry, scoring Chase Davis and trimming the Beavers’ lead to 5-2.
Pfennings was pulled for reliever Chase Watkins and things quickly went from bad to worse. Donta Williams and Kobe Kato hit run-scoring singles, the Wildcats scored another run on a Watkins wild pitch and, in a shocking turn of events, the Beavers went holding a potential 7-1 lead to facing a 5-5 tie.
An inning later, Watkins beaned Kyson Donahue with one out and, two batters after that, McClaughry blooped an opposite field single to right field, scoring Donahue. The Wildcats owned their first lead of the game, 6-5, and the Beavers (33-20, 15-12 Pac-12 Conference) never recovered.
The hard-to-swallow defeat spoiled three-hit afternoons for Meckler and Boyd and two-hit performances for Garret Forrester and Troy Claunch, who extended his hitting streak to 14 games.
Williams went 4 for 5 with two RBIs and McClaughry went 2 for 4 with those pair of clutch late-game RBI singles for the No. 7 Wildcats (38-14, 21-9).
Arizona’s dramatic win, combined with Oregon’s 8-5 loss to Stanford, delivered the Wildcats the regular season Pac-12 championship and an automatic playoff berth. The Beavers, meanwhile, will enter the final weekend of the regular season tied for fourth place with Arizona State. OSU ends the regular season with a three-game series at third-place Stanford.
Canham said his team was “extremely frustrated” in the aftermath of yet another late-game backbreaker. But the ever-optimistic coach also insisted that Sunday’s pain — and all the other heartbreak this season — could prove to be beneficial when the postseason starts next month.
“You look at all those games throughout the year and you can choose how hard you want to take it,” Canham said. “It should be tough and it should hurt you in your gut. But at the same time, how do you respond to these things? Are you going to let it just pull you into a trench? Or are you going to keep a level head and get your butt back up and go to work?
“It’s games like these that give you the opportunity to be stronger. The postseason, every game at that point, is a high-intensity pressure game where every little thing matters. So the way I look at each of these difficult games is, I’m going to take them as a blessing for our guys to learn, to get better. Ain’t nobody like losing. It tears you up inside. It frustrates the heck out of you. You know what you’re capable of doing and you want to be able to play at that level every day. But I’ll tell you what, if we play in all these tight games, I think that’s going to give us a better ability to go out and compete in the postseason-type environment.”
— Joe Freeman | jfreeman@oregonian.com | 503-294-5183 | @BlazerFreeman | Subscribe to The Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
"drops" - Google News
May 24, 2021 at 07:44AM
https://ift.tt/3oIi2I4
‘Punched in the face:’ Oregon State baseball drops 6-5 heartbreaker to Arizona Wildcats - OregonLive
"drops" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2z3v8dG
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "‘Punched in the face:’ Oregon State baseball drops 6-5 heartbreaker to Arizona Wildcats - OregonLive"
Post a Comment