Hunter Dorraugh (Photo by Alex McCreery)
Portland 3 (6-1, 0-0) vs SJSU 4 (5-3, 0-0)
Winning pitcher: Darren Jansen (1-0)
Losing pitcher: Caleb Franzen (1-1)
Save: Brady Hill
San Jose State Spartans reliever Darren Jansen took a deep breath
and gathered himself while standing in the eye of the storm.
The Portland Pilots were down 4-3 with the bases loaded and two outs in the bottom of the eighth. One spiked pitch to the backstop meant a tie game, one big swing would put a bow and ribbon on a three-game sweep.
Jansen’s mentality before the pitch was ridiculously simple:
“Just throw a strike and be aggressive.”
Poetic? Not particularly. Effective? Extremely.
The hoss hurled a fast ball past Portland’s Ty Saunder to end the inning and return heart rate monitors on Apple Watches to stable conditions.
His 3.1 innings of scoreless baseball were efficient and anxiety reducing. He ate up a critical chunk of innings in the game setting up Brady Hill to make quickwork of the Pilots to reel in a three up three down save. The quintessential set-up man like Will Smith in “Hitch”.
Brandon Clark got the start and helped set up a snappy start for the Spartans. He was phenomenal in his three innings, fast forwarding through the lineup like it was a CBD ad on a podcast.
His biggest accomplishment was not allowing a single walk, a breath of fresh air after Ethan Ross and Micky Thompson combined for 15 walks in their starts for the first two games of the series.
Building off the momentum from Clark’s stellar first inning, Robert Hamhcuk sent out his second lead-off bomb of the young season to get the bats going.
It was the first time in the series where the Spartans obtained the first lead of the game.
It wouldn’t be the only ball floating over the Bay 101 Casino sign on Sunday.
Hunter Dorraugh is now the first Spartan to hit a home run in six consecutive games. Demonstrating Mike Tyson’s knockout punch brutality while maintaining the consistency of Dimaggio’s unbreakable hitting streak.
“In that situation you just got to pass the torch,” said Dorraugh. “I was fortunate enough to get a pitch I could drive.”
Dorraugh’s home run helped the Spartans get back into the game following Cade Van Allen’s less than stellar relief appearance in the fourth inning.
He allowed four walks in 1.2 innings paving a yellow brick road for three Pilots to touch home plate. Efficiency was not on his side Sunday as he threw 53 pitches, 22 of which were strikes.
The silver lining in the relief appearance is that the Spartans have the resiliency to come back and rock the boat when things begin to trail off.
The Spartans are now one win shy off tying their win total from last year.