Cowboys’ swoon continues
West Virginia beat OSU in the Big 12 baseball tournament on Wednesday night.
As Oklahoma State coach Josh Holliday put it, this week’s Big 12 baseball tournament provided the Cowboys a second season. It could not, however, offer them a new month.
OSU’s May malaise continued Wednesday with a 8-5 loss to West Virginia in the Cowboys’ Big 12 Championship opener at Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark. The defeat dropped OSU, the tournament’s second seed, to 2-9 in May, with the Cowboys having allowed at least six runs in each game.
The Cowboys (2923-1) fell behind early but missed out on several chances to rally, most notably on Michael Neustifter’s fielder’s choice groundout with two outs and the bases loaded in the ninth.
“It was more of a grudge match, really,” OSU coach Josh Holliday said. “It was kind of sloppy for both teams, and it was just a battle of will until the very end.”
The short turnaround from a Texas Tech sweep to end the regular season prompted the Cowboys to start sophomore righthander Peyton Battenfield for the first time in his 30 career appearances. With no outs in the second, a single, hit batsman and a balk put two in scoring position for Ivan Gonzalez, who delivered a two-run single through the right to end Battenfield’s outing.
After the Mountaineers (28-25) began the fourth with three straight singles, Darius Hill hit a grounder to shortstop Matt Kroon, who made one of OSU’s five errors as his throw to first allowed an additional two runs to score, putting the Cowboys behind 6-0.
After each team added an unearned run, OSU struck for an earned pair in the sixth before capitalizing on two Mountaineer errors in the seventh to get within 7-5, but Christian Funk and Trevor Boone, both of whom represented the
tying run, struck out to end the inning. The Mountaineers picked up an insurance run in the eighth.
The Cowboys again brought the tying to the plate in the bottom half, but Gonzalez, the Mountaineers’ catcher, threw out Neustifter trying to advance to third on a ball in the dirt with Kroon in the box.
Kroon led off the ninth with a walk and Jon Littell drilled a one-out single before Funk struck out for the second out.
Boone walked to load the bases, but Neustifter’s chopper to third sent the the Cowboys to their fifth straight loss.
“Sometimes, you try a little too hard because you want to make something happen,” Holliday said. “We’ve got to find that happy medium of preparation and belief in ourselves and just go to work.”
A year after winning the tournament, the Cowboys instead dropped to the loser’s bracket on its first day.
They will face the loser of Wednesday night’s Texas TechTCU game at 12:30 p.m. Thursday in an elimination game.
“We feel like we’re one of if not the best team here,” Littell said. “You want to win every game, obviously, but there’s still a chance for us to win this whole thing. That starts tomorrow.”