Oklahoma baseball: Sooners advance to Regional championship
By Chip Rouse
Oklahoma baseball can thank a seventh inning explosion on Friday for where they find themselves on Sunday in the regional round of the NCAA Baseball Championship.
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That and a career outing by sophomore weekend starter Nathan Wiles, who pitched the Sooners to a 4-0 shutout over Samford University on Saturday, which punched the Sooners ticket to the championship game of the Tallahassee Regional on Sunday.
The No. 3-seeded Sooners will face the winner of an elimination game earlier on Sunday between Mississippi State and Samford.
Wiles came within one batter of pitching a complete game. Austin Hansen came on with two outs in the ninth inning to record the final out. The Sooner starter struck out a career high 10 batters in his longest outing of the season.
The Sooners drew first blood in the contest when senior second baseman Kyle Mendenhall blasted a three-run home run in the third inning, giving the Sooners a 3-0 lead that they would not relinquish. Oklahoma is 29-8 this season when it scores first in the game.
Mendenhall also played a key role in Oklahoma’s late-inning uprising that led to the come-from-behind win over Mississippi State on Friday. The OU second baseman had three hits in five plate appearances on Friday, including two of the Sooners’ seven doubles, which tied the second most by a team in NCAA Tournament history.
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Trailing 10-7 entering the seventh inning in Friday’s opening round, Oklahoma exploded for nine runs on the way to posting a runaway 20-10 victory, advancing the Sooners to a winner’s bracket contest with Samford, the champions of the Southern Conference.
Mississippi State on Saturday eliminated top seed and host school Florida State with a two-out, three-run, walk-off home run on Saturday that left the highly partisan Seminole home crowd at Dick Howser Stadium completely stunned.
Florida State, the No. 7 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, was on the verge of closing out a 2-0 shutout win over the Bulldogs when the bottom fell out on the host team’s season.
Down to his final strike, with two runners on and two out, Mississippi State junior Elijah MacNamee launched a game-saving bomb over the left field fence to completely reverse the course of the game. Macnamee had three hits, including a home run, against Oklahoma on Friday.
This is the first time since the 2013 season that OU has won its first two games in an NCAA regional tournament, and the Sooners have done it without the services of arguably their two best players. Senior Steele Walker and redshirt sophomore Kyler Murray are both out with injuries.
The Tallahassee Regional championship game is scheduled for 5 p.m. CT on Sunday.