For the second straight week Oregon baseball avoided a sweep with a win in the third and final game of the series. The Ducks bounced back from two painful one-run losses Friday and Saturday with a convincing 5-1 win over Arizona State on Sunday.
“We call Sunday ‘attitude day,’” third baseman Matt Eureste said. “It means coming out here ready to compete and with the right attitude, and and I think we won that today. We had the better attitude.”
Eureste provided a much-needed spark offensively for the Ducks, who mustered just three hits the night before. With two outs and runners in scoring position, Eureste knocked a triple to deep left-center to score Jakob Goldfarb and Mark Karaviotis and give Oregon a 3-0 advantage in the second inning.
The triple was the exclamation point in a three-run inning which proved to be all the insurance starting pitcher Cole Irvin would need. Irvin, whose pitch count was restricted to 75 today, lasted 5.2 innings and threw with pinpoint accuracy.
“That was probably his sharpest outing,” head coach George Horton said. “He and Coach Stiles made some adjustments in his delivery. Not that he’s been crummy before, but that was the closest I’ve seen Cole come to his freshman year since his injury.”
While the rest of the team is allowing 1.21 walks and hits per innings pitched (WHIP), Irvin has kept his WHIP to an impressive 0.88. He cushioned his season 5.33 strikeouts to walks ratio today with 7.54 strikeouts and 1.59 walks per game innings.
“Everything was working,” Irvin said of his multitude of effective pitch types. “I didn’t care necessarily how my pitches were going to be, I just wanted to throw strikes.”
Irvin ended up tossing 74 pitches, 73 percent of which went for strikes. He continuously placed himself in a position to succeed, throwing first-pitch strikes to 18 of the 22 batters he faced.
“Cole will be the first to tell you I’ve accused him of throwing too many strikes,” Horton said. “When he gets ahead sometimes he’s a little fat. When you get ahead, you want to pitch effectively just out of the zone.”
Irvin’s dominance in conjuction with Oregon’s crooked number in the second frame enabled the Ducks to play a controlled, relatively relaxed game to conclude a stressful weekend.
“Cole always fills up the zone and keeps the defense active,” Eureste said. “His pitch command is awesome with every single pitch so it makes it easy on us.”
Josh Graham, who played catcher for Oregon last season, demonstrated his value as a utility player. He stepped into the fifth spot as the designated hitter and crushed a two-out RBI-double in the fifth after pitching 2.2 scoreless relief innings and striking out four in game one of the series.
Oregon (15-8) now owns a 2-4 conference record heading into a two-game mid-week series at UC Riverside (10-13), which begins at 6 p.m. on Tuesday at Riverside Sports Complex.
Follow Kenny Jacoby on Twitter @kennyjacoby