Oklahoma baseball: Sooners look to finish regular season on high note

A couple of weeks ago, the Oklahoma baseball series at Kansas to end the regular season didn’t appear to mean much.

That three-game series is at hand, with game one on Thursday night, and there is more at stake than some Sooner fans might realize.

With a series sweep — which the Sooners have done to three Big 12 opponents  this season — and if the chips fall right in the Texas-TCU series this weekend in Austin, Oklahoma can move into second place in the standings and secure the No, 2 seed in next week’s Big 12 Baseball Championship.

That’s a big ‘if,” of course, but it could happen, and certainly provides an incentive for the Sooners to approach the Kansas series with a championship mind set.

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Oklahoma takes a 13-8 Big 12 record and 33-19 overall to Kansas, which is 6-14 in the conference and in next to last place, with a 23-27 record overall.

Kansas enters the final weekend of the 2018 regular season having lost two of three last weekend to last-place Kansas State, a team the Sooners swept two weeks ago. All three games between Kansas and Kansas State were decided by one run. In the OU-K-State series, Oklahoma outscored the Wildcats by the combined score of 18-3.

Oklahoma owns a 135-75-1 record all-time against the Jayhawks and is 40-21 in the Big 12 era. The last two times these two teams played each other, though, Kansas won two of the three games in the series. The Sooners are 8-3 in the last 11 games played at Hoglund Ballpark in Lawrence.

The Sooners go into the Kansas series hitting .277 as a team, fourth best in the Big 12. OU has three starters hitting better than .300. led by junior outfielder Steele Walker at .357. Walker and junior center fielder Kyler Murray are the big run producers in the OU lineup. Walker leads the team with 11 home runs and 49 RBI, while Murray has knocked nine balls out of the park and driven in 44.

In May alone, Murray is hitting .417, with three home runs and 12 runs batted in.

Both Walker and Murray are considered high draft prospects in next month’s Major League Baseball Draft.

A key matchup in the series will be how the Kansas pitching staff, which ranks last in the Big 12, allowing over six runs per game, handles the Oklahoma hitters. While Kansas can match OU in terms of offense, the Sooners have the advantage in pitching, with a staff ERA of 3.74, third best in the conference.