(Photo: Susan Wong/WCSN)
Sunday’s game between Arizona State Baseball and Stanford was shaping up to be another back-and-forth duel to decide the series.
After both teams went scoreless in the first inning, there would be a run scored in each of the next three frames for a total of five runs.
The x-factor would be who would crack first and break the scoring chain, and the answer was the Sun Devils (19-11, 8-7 Pac-12), who ended up losing the game 13-5.
“They played more cleanly than we did,” ASU head coach Tracy Smith said. “Our success is going to come by throwing strikes, not walking people and taking care of the baseball.”
After the Cardinal added two runs in the top half of the fifth inning to make it 4-3, ASU seemed poised to respond with runs of their own.
Redshirt freshman center-fielder Joe Lampe and redshirt freshman second baseman Sean McLain led off the inning off with singles. Later, freshman third baseman Hunter Haas added another single to make it bases loaded. But redshirt freshman right-fielder Kai Murphy flied out to center field in the next at-bat to end the inning, and the Sun Devils missed out on an opportunity to match Stanford’s output in the top half of the frame. That ended a three-inning streak of ASU scoring one run.
The runless fifth inning would be duplicated in the sixth. But Stanford made ASU pay by scoring two runs over the next two innings.
ASU miscues on defense were the cause for both runs. Redshirt junior shortstop Drew Swift made an uncharacteristic throwing error off a grounder in the sixth inning, allowing the ball to get away from freshman first baseman Jack Moss and scoring Cardinal junior catcher Vincent Martinez. In the seventh inning, Lampe lost a pop fly while trying to track it in center field, resulting in an RBI ground-rule double to make it 6-3 Stanford.
ASU had two errors and 10 walks (compared to one walk by Stanford) on the day, which would ultimately come back and bite.
“It’s not the home run that beat you, it’s the other stuff ahead of that – the walks or the error or whatever,” Smith said.
“We’re not a quick-strike offense like they are, we’re not as big and physical as they are at the moment. [It] doesn’t mean we can’t win, we [just] got to do it a different way, and the bottom line is we didn’t do it the way that we’ve been winning. Last two games we didn’t do it, [the] last two games we lost.”
Even with the mistakes on defense, the Sun Devils’ bats still had some life left in them and ASU would rally in the seventh inning.
After Lampe was hit by a pitch to begin the inning, McLain doubled off the wall in right-center to score him. Moss would later join the party with an RBI single into shallow center to bring McLain home. The first baseman continued his seven-game hit streak with a 3-5 performance on Sunday and is now batting .317 on the season.
All of a sudden, the Sun Devils were back in business, down 6-5 with two innings left to try and secure a comeback.
Freshman right-hander Brock Peery and redshirt junior right-hander Brady Corrigan combined to get out of a jam in the eighth inning, which ended a four-inning streak of at least one Cardinal run. ASU went down 1-2-3 in the bottom half, leaving the ninth inning as its last hope.
But in that ninth inning, it seemed as if the Sun Devils forgot that they had to shut down Stanford first.
The relentless Cardinal exploded with a seven-run frame as ASU simply tried to get through to the bottom half. The onslaught started with a solo blast from freshman third baseman Drew Bowser to straightaway center field. After Corrigan walked the bases loaded, freshman left-fielder Eddie Park added an RBI single.
The true dagger came in the next at-bat, as senior second baseman Tim Tawa torched an opposite-field grand-slam into the ASU bullpen to put the game seemingly out of reach at 12-5.
“We were only down one so we were hoping for a quick inning to get back in,” Haas said. “We didn’t lose belief in ourselves, but it becomes a taller task to handle.”
Smith took the pressure off of his reliever postgame.
“I know Brady wore it there in the last [inning] but as I told him, that’s not his fault,” Smith said. “We’re asking a lot of those guys given our circumstances. In a normal setting, he’s probably not in there at that time.”
Despite ASU’s consecutive losses to the Cardinal, Haas believes the series is still a positive for the Sun Devils.
“It was a pretty fun weekend to play in just because all the games were so close,” Haas said. “It’s good when you have good competition [and] they keep bouncing back and we kept bouncing back. Unfortunately we were on the short end of the stick the last two nights. We were just trying to match whatever they did and they were trying to match what we did.”
After an exhausting weekend, ASU now faces two mid-week games against a quality opponent in Grand Canyon.
“Given the extra innings [on Saturday] where the pitching is right now, [it’s] probably not ideal to have the two mid-week [games],” Smith said. “[But] from a competitive standpoint, we’ve been sitting around for over a year, we lose the better part of a season last year, and so if our mindset is not to want to play every single baseball game we can, then something’s wrong with us.
“But we’re excited to be able to be competing and playing Grand Canyon. I think it would be nice for both communities.”
