WSU baseball took on the BYU Cougars on Thursday for the first game of the four-game weekend in Long Beach. Despite getting out to a 4-1 lead after six innings, the Cougs were tracked down by BYU who snagged the 6-4 win.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Both teams eyed each other up in the first three frames, scoring no runs and managing only one hit. Then, sophomore Kyler Northrop and senior Max Hartman drew back-to-back walks to begin the fourth inning. The Cougs did not let the mistakes go unpunished as redshirt sophomore Dustin Robinson smoked a ball down the right field line scoring both runners.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With a two-run lead, the Cougs decided to continue the pressure when they tallied two more in the fifth inning. Freshman Dane Chavez and senior Gavin Roy both scored after a sac fly from Northrop and a double from Hartman.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They may have been down by four runs, but BYU was not going quietly. In the sixth, redshirt junior Kenoi Painter hit a sac fly to bring home sophomore Ridge Erickson.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Later in the eighth, sophomore Ezra McNaughton picked up an RBI single to right field scoring senior Easton Jones. Then, junior Ryder Robinson singled to center to scrape across senior Luke Anderson.\u00a0<\/p>\n
With the lead cut down to just one run, WSU began to sweat. In the top of the ninth inning, the Cougs were three outs away from getting the 4-3 win. However, BYU bore down and punched WSU in the mouth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Despite a quick two outs, junior relief pitcher August Richie hit the next batter he faced and walked the one after that. With two runners on and two outs BYU decided to pinch hit for their nine-hole spot.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fresh off the bench, freshman Cooper Jones teed up the third pitch that he saw and launched it over the left field wall for a three-run home run. With that one swing BYU took a 6-4 lead and flipped the game on its head.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew he was going to throw me a fastball,\u201d Jones said. \u201cHe threw it, made a mistake, and [I] hit it out.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
For BYU, bringing Jones in to pinch-hit was the game plan early on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAbout the seventh inning they told me just to be ready,\u201d Jones said. \u201cI would get my opportunity eventually\u2026 Ninth inning came up, two outs, and they just said \u2018hey, go in there and try to get a job done\u2019. That\u2019s what I did,\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
For head coach Trent Pratt, Jones was the ideal batter for the situation.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201c[Richie] was just kind of struggling throwing a secondary pitch to right handed hitters,\u201d he said. \u201cCooper\u2019s a real good fastball hitter, so we knew hey he might have our best chance on the bench to run a ball in the gap,\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Down by two, WSU was unable to mount a comeback. Freshman Trevor Smith flew out to left field to close out the game and BYU snatched the 6-4 win from the jaws of defeat.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To Pratt, he attributes much of the win to relief pitcher senior Ashton Johnson who spun almost five scoreless innings.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMan, most of it. All of it\u2026 we\u2019re down four when he comes in and he kept throwing them zeros,\u201d Pratt said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The BYU Cougars will take on WSU again on Friday, and they have already taken some lessons from the opening matchup.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re going to play baseball,\u201d Pratt said. \u201cThey bunt the ball really good. They\u2019re going to run. So, we got to do a better job of taking away their strengths and taking away the bunt a little more,\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
WSU baseball takes on BYU at 1:05 p.m on Friday and then takes on Long Beach State immediately afterwards for the second game of the double header. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WSU baseball took on the BYU Cougars on Thursday for the first game of the four-game weekend in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198745,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[131,133,132],"class_list":["post-198744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}