Oklahoma baseball rewind: Sooners take 2 of 3 from TCU to open Big 12 play

The Oklahoma baseball team scored four times in the home half of the seventh inning on Sunday to overcome a two-run deficit and defeat 11th-ranked TCU 7-5 and win the three-game series from the Horned Frogs.

A four seventh-inning runs by Oklahoma scored after two were out. A pair of two-run singles by Sooner pinch hitter John Spikerman and first baseman Anthony Mackenzie produced the damage and secured the come-from-behind win in the series finale.

TCU had scored two times in the top half of the seventh off of Will Carsten, who was on in relief of OU starter James Witt, to break a 3-3 tie and give the Horned Frogs a 5-3 advantage. The Sooners’ Julian Hachem came in and recorded the final two outs in the inning and got the win, his first of the season.

“It’s just battling,” said OU head coach Skip Johnson in speaking to media about the Sooners’ come-from-behind victory on Sunday. “That’s really who we are, what we’ve been. That’s what our culture has always been about.” This is Johnson’s sixth season leading Oklahoma baseball.

TCU captured the opening game in the series on Friday with a 13-5 win, pounding out 15 hits off of five Oklahoma pitchers. The Horned Frogs scored three times in the second inning off of Sooner starter Kale Davis. TCU never trailed in the game. The Frogs led 8-1 going into the eighth and polished off the win scoring two times in the eighth and three more times in the ninth.

Rocco Garza-Gongora hit a solo home run for Oklahoma in the third inning, and Dakota Harris blasted a three-run shot in the eighth and drove in four of OU’s five runs in the game, but it was not near enough to make up the run differential. Davis was charged with the loss, his first of the season.

The Sooners rebounded on Saturday to even the series in a much lower-scoring affair. Spikerman tripled down the right-field line in the fifth inning, driving in a pair of runs. OU scored again in the eighth and made those three runs stand up in a 3-1 victory. TCU scored its lone run in the game on an eighth-inning solo home run by leadoff hitter Brayden Taylor.

Braxton Douthit, a graduate transfer from Lamar University, started Saturday’s game on the mound for the Sooners and went six and a third innings, allowing no runs and just one hit in earning his third win of the season without a loss.

Coming into the series with TCU, Oklahoma had lost 19 of the last 26 games between the two teams, but the Sooners also won two of three last season at TCU and now have won four of the last six games.

The next action for Oklahoma (13-7, 2-1) is a Tuesday night home game at L. Dale Mitchell Park against Dallas Baptist (13-7).