(Photo: Susan Wong/WCSN)
Home plate wasn’t quite Arizona State Baseball’s best friend on Thursday night.
While three batters were already hit by ASU’s pitching staff early on, the first game of a pivotal three-game set with UCLA unraveled at the dish in the third inning.
By that time it was already 4-0, with redshirt sophomore first baseman JT Schwartz delivering an RBI double and redshirt senior designated hitter Kyle Cuellar lining a three-run home run to right center in the first inning.
But in the fourth, the Bruins had it going again with the bases loaded, which led to ASU redshirt sophomore right-handed pitcher Tyler Thornton being pulled after 2.1 innings of work.
With freshman right-hander Brock Peery replacing Thornton, UCLA junior second baseman Mikey Perez chopped one to freshman third baseman Hunter Haas, who attempted to throw home for the out, except the throw to redshirt freshman catcher Nate Baez was just high and outside of his grasp. The ball would sail behind Baez and lead to two Bruin runs, breaking the game open by measure of 6-0.
It would get even worse for Peery in the next at-bat, with a wild pitch taking a high bounce into the netting behind home plate, scoring another run for UCLA.
The Bruins kept piling it on the entire night, with five innings filled with crooked numbers in a thrashing of the Sun Devils. The final score was a whopping 21-9 – the most runs ASU has allowed since losing 31-9 in May of 2016 to USC.
“We got our buts kicked,” ASU head coach Tracy Smith said. “Pretty simple.”
Costly mistakes were rampant for ASU, with three errors leading to four runs for UCLA. The Sun Devils’ pitchers also had nine walks compared to the Bruins’ two.
“Tyler [Thornton] definitely struggled tonight, but I was probably more disappointed in how we played defensively,” Smith said. “Because we’re better than that. We haven’t had a game like that all season, it’s just unfortunate the timing of it right now. It just didn’t seem like anything was going well.”
The only real life ASU’s offense showed early on was in the fourth inning, when the deficit was already 11-0. Freshman first baseman Jack Moss woke up the Phoenix Municipal Stadium crowd with a two-run home run into the ASU bullpen in right field. Two at-bats later, Baez continued his hot streak with a solo blast that stayed just fair in left.
With his 2-3 hitting night, the utility man now has 15 RBI and all six of his home runs on the year in his last nine games.
“I’d say [Baez has] made a difference,” Smith said. “I think he’s done a really good job of stepping up and supplying maybe the best combination of defense and offense. We just feel this is the first time we really had three options at catching, but I think Nate has earned the opportunity, certainly offensively, to continue to be in there.”
The Bruins pitching staff – which sits third in the Pac-12 with a 3.86 ERA – went into lockdown mode until the ninth inning. ASU finally ended the offensive drought with five runs in the last frame, led by redshirt freshman second baseman Sean McLain’s three run bomb to left field and redshirt junior left-fielder Allbry Major’s two-run single to center field.
But even with the late push at the end, Smith wants ASU to just move on and forget the performance. He believes the NCAA Division I Baseball Committee will overlook the outing when the postseason tournament field of 64 teams is announced.
“We’re not going to make too much out of this one,” Smith said. “I’m thanking goodness this isn’t something we did in a regional a week from now.
“I’m just not going to react to one baseball game. I would assume the committee’s the same way. If you look at the total body of work – and the total body of work’s been pretty good – and if you look at the context at which it’s been done, it’s been really good.”
