Baseball
Buckeyes Win One and Lose One on Final Day of Baseball Season
By John PorentasOne the one hand, you have to admire the Buckeyes for putting it all on the line for a game on Sunday. On the other hand, you kind of wish they had saved just a little something for the second game.
The Buckeyes avenged the 24-8 drubbing they took at the hands of Georgia in the first game of the NCAA regionals and eliminated the Bulldogs from the tournament by laying a 13-6 defeat on them to send them back to the Peanut State. The win was a sweet one for OSU after the humiliation of last Friday, but it came at a cost.
The Buckeyes used up essentially all their pitching to earn the win over the Bulldogs, a win that came with a door prize, a date with No. 1 seed Florida State just two or so hours after the conclusion of the Georgia game. To say that the Buckeyes didn't have much left in the tank would be an understatement.
The Seminoles pounded a parade of OSU pitchers for 37 runs on 38 hits and 66 total bases. All of those numbers are NCAA tournament single-game records as was the 15 doubles the Seminoles racked up along the way. The final score was 37-6 in a game that the Buckeyes obviously had no chance to win from inning one.
For those of you with very short term memories, like one game, it was a miserable day for the Buckeyes. For those of you with a bit more of an attention span, it really wasn't all that bad. The win over Georgia was sweet, very sweet, and the loss, even the way it happened, wasn't totally unexpected. OSU simply did not have any horses left in the barn when they took the field for the second time, so the work just didn't get done.
"“Well, we had one good game and one bad game today,” Ohio State coach Bob Todd said.
“I’m not sure you can tell the kids anything after a game like that. Everybody knows what happened today pitching-wise. And everything they did was right and what we did was wrong. It was like an intra squad game.”
Despite the drubbing in the second game, the Buckeyes earned a sweet win over the Bulldogs.
“I think people that saw us play on Friday that are from this area probably said to themselves, why is Ohio State here?" said Todd.
"We did not play very well, we did not play the type of baseball we’ve played all year.
"I’ve made that comment. I thought our players did a very good job of coming out, staying focused. They executed what we talked about trying to do and in the middle of that ball game when it came time to play the short game and do the little things to give us a chance to keep putting pressure on them, we were able to do it and they couldn’t handle the pressure.”
The Buckeyes defeated the Bulldogs despite falling behind 5-0 in the second inning. OSU came back to score three in the bottom of the second, two in the third, and two in the fourth to take a 7-5 lead. OSU iced the game with a six run outburst in the seventh. Center fielder Mike Stephens homered twice in the game, once on an inside the park homer.
The Buckeyes finished the season with an overall record of 42-19, a Big Ten regular-season championship and a second place finish in the regional. That is a fair amount of success for a team that was paper-thin on pitching. What the OSU pitching staff lacked in numbers it made up for with quality. Senior Jake Hale will long be remembered as one of the best closers ever to wear the Scarlet and Gray. Sophomores Drew Rucinski and Alex Wimmers both showed they are outstanding hurlers in their roles as setup men and starters respectively. That trio was outstanding and has a chance against the highest levels of college competition. What plagued the Buckeyes all year, and in the last game of the season, was a lack of quality depth on the pitching staff, an issue that the OSU coaching staff must address.
The Buckeyes will return all but three of their key contributors next season. The biggest loss will be Hale followed by team captain Justin Miller and left fielder Mike Arp. The rest of the Buckeyes will be back however, and if Todd and his coaching staff can add some young talent to the pitching staff, and if some of the players who were plagued by injury can come back. the future of OSU baseball will be very bright.
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