Saturday, March 1, 2008
NASHVILLE, Ten. – The Music City Classic offered Kansas no relief from its hitting woes.
Vanderbilt left-hander Mike Minor (2-0) cruised to victory Friday night, striking out nine in 6.2 innings – tying a career high – and no-hitting Kansas (2-5) into the sixth. At the plate, the No. 7 Commodores (4-1) offered Minor an abundance of support, routing the Jayhawks 7-1.
“Any time you go out and face a guy who’s got that kind of stuff, you’ve got to find a way to stay in the game,” Kansas coach Ritch Price. “You pitcher’s got to put up the same zeroes with him and match him until you get deep in the game. Then hopefully you can get his pitch count up and hit a couple balls on the button late. He was pretty dominant, there’s no doubt about it.”
For all intents and purposes, the game was decided after the first inning.
In the top of the inning, Minor sat the Kansas order down in order and the offense wasted little time giving him a lead to work with in the bottom of the inning.
Vanderbilt center fielder David Macias led off the inning with a single through the right side of the infield off Kansas junior left-hander Nick Czyz (0-2). Macias swiped second and moved 90 feet closer to home on a single by right fielder Dominic de la Osa, who also stole second base.
With two out and Macias and de la Osa in scoring position, first baseman Andrew Giobbi sent a ground ball through the right side to send them both home for a 2-0 lead.
From there, the attention turned to Minor.
After sitting down eight straight Jayhawks, Mike Minor’s streak ended with a walk to senior designated hitter Joe Southers in the third. The base on balls was Minor’s first of the season. Junior center fielder Nick Faunce followed with a walk of his own, but that was the extent of Kansas’ attempt at a rally.
Walks would be the most Kansas could muster off Minor until the sixth inning. After walking Southers a second time, Minor got revenge, picking Southers off first base bye a couple feet. But, with two out, sophomore Robby Price slapped a single to center field, ending Minor’s no-hit bid.
“Our bats got better after the first time around. We were better than we were Wednesday,” Price said, referring to the Jayhawks’ 16-strikout performance against Arkansas on Wednesday.
With the perfect game and no-hitter gone, Minor still had a shutout going in the seventh, but the Jayhawks took that away, too.
Junior first baseman Preston Land led off the inning with a double. Two batters later, junior catcher Buck Afenir sent a deep fly ball to straightaway center field. Macias tried to run it down, but the ball got past him and caromed off the wall.
Afenir raced around to third as Land came home to score Kansas’ lone run of the game.
Opposite Minor, Czyz was knocked out of the game in the sixth. In five-plus innings, Czyz struck out six, walking only one, but he struggled to miss Vanderbilt bats. The Commodores knocked around nine hits off Czyz, scoring six runs – five of which earned.
“I thought Czyz did a nice job,” Price said. “He had runners at third base with less than two outs and was able to get strikeouts in two different innings. Then he couldn’t finish the inning. He could have easily put us through five innings and held them to one run, which going into the game you knew that had to be the case.”
The offensive output was especially impressive for Vanderbilt, considering they were without all-American third baseman Pedro Alvarez.
“We’ve got to develop kind of a new identity really because Pedro puts a different dimension on the lineup,” Vanderbilt coach Tim Corbin said. “But I was glad we made decent contact against Czyz. We’ve seen him before and we knew what he was about, we knew he was going to be a tough guy to win against.”
Kansas plays its second game of the Music City Classic Saturday at 12:05 in the afternoon.
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