Rice Baseball Takes Two Against UTSA
Rice and UTSA are some of the top teams in Conference USA, and they went head-to-head in Houston in a doubleheader on Saturday. Check out William Scott’s recap of the action:
Game 1:
Severe thunderstorms in Houston on Friday night postponed the Rice-UTSA series opener to Saturday, but it was definitely worth the wait as the Owl faithful witnessed a fantastic game where their team won 9-8. The Owls carried a 9-6 lead into the 9th, of what was already a crazy game. UTSA scored two runs in the 9th to make it interesting, but the Owls hung on to take game 1. John Williamson went 3-3 with 3 runs in the victory and Matt Ditman came out of the bullpen to pitch 4 innings and strike out four to earn the win. Geonte Jackson and Trent Bowles went 3-5 in the losing effort.
Game 2:
This game was close…until the 6th inning where Rice scored five runs to pull away from the Roadrunners. It all started when Kirby Taylor crushed a double to score a run. Here’s some advice to pitchers everywhere: do not have the bases loaded for the cleanup hitter. Later in the inning, John Clay Reeves took advantage of that opportunity and ripped a single to left field to score two more runs to give Rice the 7-2 lead. And it didn’t get any better for UTSA, as the Owls were victorious 8-2. Ford Stainback went 2-3 with 2 RBI’s and Hunter Kopycinski went 3-4 with an RBI in the win. Starting pitcher Jordan Stephens went 5 innings with 7 K’s and two earned runs to improve to 4-3 on the year. Those 7 K’s led to him picking up his 200th career strikeout. Aaron Burns delivered 5.1 innings allowing five earned for UTSA. Logan Kinder went 2-3 with an RBI in the loss.
Observations:
I was very impressed by the play of freshman Glenn Otto in the second game of the day. He came out of the bullpen to deliver three perfect innings, facing 10 batters and striking out 7 of them. Yeah…that’s pretty good. I got a chance to interview him after the game and here’s what he had to say about his incredible performance:
On striking out 7 out of 10:
“I tried to stay down in the zone as much as I can, mix it up.”
On pitching three innings of relief as a freshman:
“It’s a great team win. It helps when you have a five run lead, you can attack the zone and not have to worry about one base-runner. So yeah it’s a great team win, to come out and get 14 hits makes it easy on the mound.”
On sweeping the double-header:
“Oh it’s huge. We feel like we need to win out to do what we really need to do. We feel like we’re good enough to do that and we’ve had some tough road losses in the beginning of the season. So we just need to sweep and do what we can.”
Rice improves to 26-15 on the year, and 14-6 in C-USA play. UTSA falls to 22-17 and 9-8 in conference play. The Owls and Roadrunners are back at it on Sunday at Reckling Park, as Rice goes for the series sweep at 1:00 local time.
Twitter: @WScottCSM
