ASU Baseball Goes 1-2 In Road Series Against Oregon State; Spence Out With Injury

by Cory Williams on May 4, 2009 12:12 PM MST in ASU Baseball Comment 1 comment

It was a tough weekend for ASU baseball, who went 1-2 in Corvallis to finish up a seven game road trip with a mediocre 4-3 record.

On top of that, ptcher Josh Spence was out this weekend with a lingering finger injury on his throwing hand, which was caused by an errant pregame ball before his Stanford start.

Without Spence, the bullpen faces a much tougher workload, and it showed this weekend.

On May 2nd, ASU went into the bottom of the ninth with a 3-2 lead, but was unable to close out the win, allowing OSU to score 2 in the ninth to earn a walk off win.

The next night, Oregon State was down 5-3 in the 7th, but scored 2 in the 7th and 5 in the 8th to run away with a 10-5 victory. Matt Newman had a poor outing, giving up 4 runs in one inning of work, in relief of Jordan Swagerty.

ASU starts an 8-game homestand tomorrow night with a two get set against San Diego. Winthrop and Oregon will also be coming to town in the next week. In fact, there is only one road game left for ASU: a one-game visit to Tucson on May 20th.

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Rough weekend

We were lucky that Mike Leake is so dominant, or we very well could have lost all 3 games. Spence’s injury really put the Devils behind the 8 ball, as it caused quite the ripple effect on our pitching through the whole weekend.

Blair could only make it through 4 1/3 Saturday night, and then Lambson was left in for far too long because Murph doesn’t trust the rest of the bullpen in a tight game. Swagerty was unavailable to come in and close because we needed him to start on Sunday. Then on Sunday, when Swags had a strong start, Lambson was unavailable because of his long relief stint and none of the other pitchers out of the bullpen could slam the door on the Beavers.

Between that and the lack of clutch hitting (there must have been what, 20 men left on base the last 2 games?) and the absolutely critical back to back errors by the freshman middle infielders when we gave up the lead on Sunday…just shows how razor thin the margin of error can be, cause we were just a couple of timely base hits or key pitches away from either getting a 3 game sweep…or getting swept in return. Hopefully the return to home cooking at Packard in the non-conference games this week will be kind.

by Beatuofa on May 5, 2009 12:59 AM MST reply actions