From Marathon Games To Strange No-Hitters, College Baseball’s Leap Day Gets Weird
Image credit: Liberty righthander Noah Skirrow (Photo courtesy of Liberty)
Some of the best items on Saturday’s college baseball schedule lived up to the advance billing.
The Shriners Hospitals for Children College Classic in Houston provided close games and outstanding performances, East Carolina and Mississippi played an air-tight game in the showcase slot of the Keith LeClair Classic in Greenville, N.C., and top-ranked Florida survived another scare from a competitive Troy team.
But all of that shared center stage with a litany of crazy results around the country as Leap Day got weird in college baseball.
The last two weekends have been filled with no-hitters, including by Tulane and San Diego on Friday night, but there have been none like the one Liberty threw against Marist on Saturday.
The Red Foxes didn’t have a hit against three Flames pitchers, led by righthander Noah Skirrow and his 5.1 innings, but they did somehow manage to score four runs in a 6-4 defeat.
The first two runs came in the second, which gave them a 2-1 lead. With the bases loaded on a hit by pitch and two walks, Dylan Hoy walked to force in a run and Patrick Lightner reached on a fielder’s choice off a misplayed bunt to bring home the second run.
Then, Marist scored two more in the sixth, which again gave it the lead, this time, 4-3. With runners on second and third after two walks and a passed ball, Marist scored on an RBI groundout by Matt Rubayo and on an error by Liberty second baseman Trey McDyre off the bat of Hoy.
Liberty responded with a run in the sixth and two in the eighth to grab the lead again, and righthanders Troy Britts and Landon Riley combined to toss the final 3.2 innings to close out the program’s first no-hitter since 2000. It is also now the leader in the clubhouse for the strangest no-hitter of the season.
The strange nature of that game is perhaps eclipsed only by what happened in Davis, Calif., where UC Davis and Loyola Marymount played one game that was nearly the equivalent of three games, spread out over two days.
Davis and LMU had their game suspended after 14 innings in a 2-2 tie on Friday night on account of darkness. Surely, they had to think, when the game resumed Saturday it wouldn’t last much longer and the second game of the series could be played as scheduled following the conclusion.
But the baseball gods had other thoughts, as the teams combined to play ten more innings on Saturday afternoon before the Aggies walked off with a 4-3 win. The game went long enough that the teams had to postpone the rest of the series until Sunday.
Things looked on the verge of ending in the 22nd inning, when LMU went up 3-2 after an error on center fielder Jalen Smith, but it was not to be. Smith came up in the bottom of the 22nd and made up for his miscue by tying things up with a sac fly.
Finally, the Aggies walked it off in the 24th thanks to a sac fly off the bat of DH Spencer Gedestad.
Long games like this always feature marathon relief outings and this game was no exception. All five UC Davis pitchers threw at least four innings, with righthander Nate Freeman throwing seven innings. Meanwhile, LMU had their own seven-inning relief appearance from lefthander Holden Christian.
While the game took more than 24 hours to play, the action spanned 6.5 hours. It fell one inning shy of matching the longest game in NCAA history, a 25-inning game between Boston College and Texas at the 2009 Austin Regional. It did, however, set the Big West record for most innings in a game, surpassing a 20-inning game between Long Beach State and San Jose State in 1973.
With the victory,UC Davis improved to 7-3 and is off to its best 10-game start to a season in 20 years.
In many ways, it was a good day for Harvard, and for a while, it looked far more straightforward than the proceedings at Liberty and UC Davis. It played Alabama close on the road, at one point leading the game 3-0 in the fifth inning, and held the Crimson Tide scoreless until the bottom of the sixth.
But things came unraveled late, specifically in an eight-run Bama eighth inning that featured a three-error play for Harvard that let in three runs.
The ball never left the infield but a series of overthrows sent the play on an absurd spiral.
Finally, in a play that combines the walk-off drama of UC Davis’ win over Loyola Marymount and the absurdity of Harvard’s three-error play, Portland walked off with a win over Stephen F. Austin in unique fashion.
With the game tied 7-7 in the bottom of the ninth, Portland loaded the bases on a walk, a single and an intentional walk. With one out, catcher Nich Klemp stepped to the plate and hit a ball up the middle that looked like the beginning of a 6-4-3 double play, right up until it caromed off the umpire stationed behind the pitcher, allowing the winning run to score.
The Pilots have played well this season, as that win took them to 8-1 on the season, and sometimes when you’re playing well, the breaks just go your way. If that play isn’t evidence of that, it’s hard to know what is.
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