Runs were at a premium until the Oregon Ducks’ broke through for a five-run tenth inning en route to their 8-3 win at Washington State.
Tim Susnara provided Oregon the game’s first run with a sacrifice fly scoring Phil Craig-St. Louis in the second.
Cole Irvin rode with one run of support through 6.1 strong innings, inducing 13 groundouts in 26 batters faced.
Washington State’s Ben Roberts attempted to score from second on a two-out single in the third, but right fielder Jakob Goldfarb gunned him out at the plate to protect Oregon’s 1-0 lead.
In a wild turn of events, the Ducks missed their biggest opportunity in the game in the fifth inning. Cougars left-handed reliever Matt Bower entered the game to face pinch hitter Matt Eureste, a lefty, with a 1-1 count, an out and the bases loaded. Manager George Horton then substituted Josh Graham, a righty, for his Eureste mid-at-bat. Unfazed, Bower struck out Graham and induced a groundout from Oregon’s best hitter Mitchell Tolman to end the scoring threat.
After advancing to second on a passed ball, Daniel Patzlaff scored on Mark Karaviotis’s seventh-inning single to extend the Ducks’ lead to 2-0.
Irvin left the game with one out and a pair of runners on base in the seventh, and the Cougars pounced on reliever Cooper Stiles. Washington State took the lead with three runs in three batters, capped by Cooper Elliott’s two-out RBI double.
Brandon Cuddy delivered a sacrifice fly to score Austin Grebeck and knot the score at three apiece in the eighth.
Stephen Nogosek let runners on first and third with one out in the eighth, but muscled his way out of the jam. He punched consecutive Cougars out on swinging strikeouts, topping out at 95 m.p.h. on the radar gun.
 
Nogosek eluded disaster once again in the ninth, sending the game into extra innings with two Cougars left on base.
The Ducks loaded the bases in the tenth and called upon freshman pinch hitter Kyle Kasser, who walked off with a pinch-hit walk in Oregon’s 3-2 win over Oregon State in near identical circumstances. He came through in the clutch yet again, only this time he got to swing the bat. Kasser’s RBI single pushed the Ducks ahead 4-3, and from there the floodgates opened.
Oregon piled on four more runs in the frame, then summoned Garrett Cleavinger, whose made the most pitching appearances on program history, to lock down the victory. Cleavinger walked the first two batters, but earned three outs in his final three pitches of the game.
The Ducks (28-21, 10-12) will take on at Washington State (25-22, 8-14) again tomorrow at 7:00 p.m. Both tomorrow and Sunday’s games will be televised on Pac-12 Networks.
Follow Kenny Jacoby on Twitter @KennyJacoby