Sunday, May 15, 2016

ASU vs. Arizona baseball recap: Wildcats drop finale to Sun Devils

Not a great finish to the home portion of the conference schedule.

When the Arizona Wildcats won Saturday night's game against the Arizona State Sun Devils, they clinched the most home conference wins in a season since moving to Hi Corbett.

That number would stay at ten after Sunday's home conference finale.

In an uninspiring effort where the Wildcats (32-18, 15-12 Pac-12) only managed four hits, ASU (31-17, 13-11 Pac-12) took the series and season finale by a score of 5-1.

"Disappointed in today," Arizona head coach Jay Johnson said after Sunday's loss. "I thought we were ready to play and I thought we would play a little bit better."

Arizona was 0-for-11 with runners in scoring position and 0-for-13 with runners on base at all.

"That's a good team over there, and they're gonna make you pay when you don't play your best," Johnson continued about ASU.

Through five innings, the score was 0-0 as Kevin Ginkel and Jordan Aboites duked it out on the mound. Ginkel was the beneficiary of several nice defensive plays, even though the Wildcats ended up committing three errors on the day.

"Anybody that's got that kind of arm strength can have success," Johnson said about Ginkel's performance against the Sun Devils -- he gave up just nine hits in 15 innings against ASU this year. "I thought he had good down angle on his fastball and using both sides of the plate. I thought his offspeed stuff was really good, and it was an impressive deal to get to where he got to."

"14 straight innings of scoreless baseball against those guys is good for Clayton Kershaw and it's the Giants. It was a good job by Kevin. He gave us a chance today."

It started with this slick Cody Ramer double play in the first inning:

Then Justin Behnke got into the action with a diving catch in the third:

And finally, Cesar Salazar picked a runner off at third in the fifth to keep the game scoreless.

The Sun Devils opened the scoring on, of all things, a double play ball in the sixth. With runners on the corners, Colby Woodmansee lined a shot at third baseman Bobby Dalbec, but Dalbec went for the two outs rather than keeping the runner from scoring.

The third out of the inning was way more impressive than that

The game got out of hand in the seventh. Ginkel gave up two singles to start the inning, which is when Dalbec took the mound for the second-straight night.

He struck out the first hitter he faced, which brought ASU relief pitcher Eder Erives to the plate.

Erives had never batted in his college career (91-of-241 in high school). But sure enough, he looped one into left for an RBI single.

"I called the wrong pitch," Arizona's freshman catcher Salazar explained of the hit. "That was on me."

"Changeup," Salazar said about what the pitch was that he called. "Like I said, that's the past. I'm not thinking about that."

That was just the beginning of the floodgates opening up on Arizona in the seventh. An RBI double by Gage Canning and a two-run single by Andrew Shaps put ASU up 5-0 at the time.

The shutout was avoided in the eighth. Ramer and Zach Gibbons opened the inning with walks. After a JJ Matijevic groundout moved them into scoring position, Ryan Aguilar hit a sac fly to shallow center to plate Ramer.

Still though, no hits with runners on base.

Arizona will have a few days to recover from this. They'll travel to Eugene to take on the Oregon Ducks in a three-game series that begins on Friday. After a Utah win over Stanford on Sunday, the Wildcats are now a game and a half out of the Pac-12 lead with only one series remaining.



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