The weather caused some major havoc to the Houston-area college baseball season this past weekend as both the Houston Cougars and Rice Owls, playing big series with important post-season implications, waited out rain-outs, delays, and bizarre game times as they attempted, and succeeded, in playing all of their games.
The happiest fans in the city probably belong to those at Rice where the Owls won two of three games against the Southern Miss Golden Eagles to clinch the number-one seed in the post-season tournament scheduled for Houston next week. With the wins, the Owls’ record for the season is 32-19 and 15-6 in conference. Their closest competitor is Southern Miss, and they’re three games out with only three conference games remaining.
Friday’s scheduled game was delayed until Saturday afternoon. The Owls
were going to attempt to start play at 1 p.m., then moved game time to 3
p.m.before finally starting at 3:45 p.m. And things got off to a bad
start as Rice ace Taylor Wall got pounded by Southern Miss. Going into
the eighth inning, the Owls were down 11-2 before scoring eight
eighth-inning runs with no outs. The Owls lost the game 11-10, but the
players said that eighth-inning comeback propelled the team to a win in
the second game.
Starting about 45 minutes after the conclusion
of the first game, the Owls fell behind 2-0 in the top of the first as
Rice pitcher Mike Ojala surrendered a two-run homer. But Ojala settled
down and gave up no more runs as the Owls, behind the bat of Anthony
Rendon, got the 10-2 win. Rendon said the time waiting for the Saturday
games to finally begin was difficult in that the players like dealing
with the certainty of a known start time.
“It’s really tough,” he
said. “When you get that mentality that you’re going to play at one
o’clock, or you’re going to play at three, then your mind’s like set,
well I don’t have to get ready until three usually. But when you’re
waiting and waiting, you get pushed back to three, and so on, we’re just
in there trying to watch TV and trying to get off our feet, and then we
come out here and it’s still kind of drizzling, it’s just an awful
day.”
After the Owls went through eight pitchers in the first
game, Ojala knew it was important that he get deep into the game and
spare his bullpen. And though he only went six, that was enough as
bullpen ace Abe Gonzalez was able to close out the final three innings.
“Definitely,”
Ojala said when asked if he felt the pressure of the game. “You can’t
have two starters not go — one go less than less five. You’ve got to
get…it’s a little pressure. But it’s fun. I didn’t want to come out of
the game. Coach Graham’s like ‘111 pitches. You’ve got to come out of
the game.’ But I was like, ‘one more inning, man.’ I haven’t thrown a
complete game at Rice. I’ve got to start pushing my pitch count, I don’t
know. But it was fun.”
Rice coach Wayne Graham also didn’t miss
the importance of Ojala’s game.
“If we lose that game we’re in
deep trouble,” he said. “Not that we’re out of trouble, but we’d really
be in trouble if we lost that game. If we lost that game, it would be
possible for Southern Miss to leave here…in first place with the
tiebreaker. So it was critical.”
The Owls closed out the weekend
with a 21-14 win on Sunday, which made it impossible for Southern Miss
to finish the season in first place, or with the chance of the
tiebreaker over Rice.
The Cougars, who are struggling to make the
tournament that they’re hosting, needed a big weekend. And despite the
weather struggles, they were able to win two of three games from
conference foe Marshall, allowing them to stay in the hunt for a
tournament spot.
Friday’s game was rained out. It was rescheduled
for 11 a.m. on Saturday morning, then moved to 2 p.m., then finally
started around 3:30 p.m. The Cougars won the first game of the
doubleheader, but lost the nightcap 5-3. With their season hanging on
the line, freshman Eric Brooks took the ball and pitched the finest game
of his career in a Sunday-morning finale that began at 10 a.m. due to
weather concerns.
Brooks shut down the Marshall offense, going
7.1 innings while getting a career-high six strikeouts and giving up
only one run as the Cougars got the 10-1 win. He got all of the
offensive support he needed after the Cougars scored four runs in the
second inning.
“That was a big confidence booster,” Brooks said
about that second inning. “Anytime your team can score — it feels good
to be able to go out there and pitch with the lead because then you can
go out there and you can pitch to contact instead of having to try pitch
around contact.”
Cougar coach Rayner Noble knows the team needed
a miracle, and he realizes the team struggled this weekend to get some
much-needed wins.
“We fought, we scrapped, and we battled,” he
said. “We’re still alive. We’ve got to just keep pushing and doing
things right. We’ve got to get solid pitching. I think what we missed
this weekend was the big hit. Hopefully we can put that together as we
go into Tuesday and the weekend.”
With the wins, the Cougars
record improved to 22-28 on the season and 9-12 in conference. Their
post-season chances are still alive, but the team needs a miracle this
weekend. A miracle that includes sweeping East Carolina and hoping for a
whole bunch of other teams to lose.
The Owls and Cougars face
each tonight, at Cougar Field, in a non-conference match-up, at 6:30
p.m. Ultimately, the game means nothing. But ultimately, neither team
wants to lose heading into the final weekend.
This article appears in May 13-19, 2010.
