By Matt Weiner (@MattWeiner20) — BSB Beat Reporter
It was the top of the tenth with the score knotted up at five, but the pendulum swung the Spartans’ way after they tied the score up in the bottom of the ninth thanks to a Robert Hamchuk rope to right field.
The mission was simple for Darren Jansen: get three outs and make sure no one with the word “Dons” draped horizontally across a gray jersey touches home plate.
SJSU’s coaches trusted that he would keep things together like he was the button on a pair of jeans worn by a hedonist at Golden Corral.
Jansen’s day on the mound started against the Don’’ cleanup hitter Brandon Greim who doubled and scored a short-lived go-ahead run in the eighth inning.
Greim dug in and looked across the mound at a hoss on the mound with the body of the infamous burglarizing black bear “Hank the Tank.”
Feeding him a steady diet of bullets down the plate, Greim went down on strikes for the first.
Following Greim was Gabe Giosso, who laid down a critical sacrifice bunt that moved Greim over to third base in the eighth before he was knocked in.
Giosso suffered the same fate as Greim, but in a different fashion, completely whiffing on a curveball in the dirt. The tight 12-6 spin Jansen put on the pitch followed the same precise vertical revolutions of a wheel on Lance Armstrong’s bike during his multiple Tour de France “wins.”
Things got dicey when he beamed Harris Williams III with a fastball, putting a potential two-out rally on the horizon for the Dons.
As luck would have it, Jansen would face Nick Yovetich, who hit a towering home run over the sky-scraping center field wall in the third inning.
Now one swing on a pitch catching too much of the plate meant the Spartans would enter the bottom of the tenth chasing two.
During this mano a mano chess match, one man returned to a previous form and it wasn’t Yovetich.
Jansen’s ability to deliver a scoreless frame was the alley before Omar Gastelum threw down the walk-off oop.
Without the scoreless frame in the top of the tenth, the ballgame would have looked drastically different.
This is now 4.1 straight scoreless innings for Jansen who’s shaping into a reliable arm to slam the door shut when need be.