Gorilla baseball is finding itself on a heater, as they swept Rogers State this past weekend, stretching their winning streak to nine games. The Gorillas now sit at 37-8 on the season, as they enter the home stretch of the regular season.
Beginning on Friday, Pitt State pulled out a last minute 3-2 win over the Hillcats. Things remained deadlocked in the game early on, until Rogers State found a pair of runs in the fifth inning to take the first lead. Pitt State would find the board with a single run in the sixth, but would remain behind until the eighth inning, when they found the tying run. Things looked poised to go into extra innings, but Pitt State scored the game winning run in the bottom of the ninth to take the win.
The Gorillas got run-scoring singles from senior Cooper Wesslund in the sixth inning and senior Grant Nottlemann in the eighth frame. Junior Eric Bacon opened the eighth inning with a double and came around on Nottlemann’s hit. Junior Brayden McClure limited Rogers State to a pair of runs and seven hits over 7.0 innings pitched. He walked three and registered six strikeouts.
Following the exciting win, Pitt State would find their offensive groove, outscoring the Hillcats 13 to 1 and forcing a seven-inning run rule victory. The Gorillas would get on the board first, scoring a pair of runs in the first inning, and then tacking on three in the third. Rogers State would finally answer in the top of the fifth with their lone run of the game, but Pitt State put the Hellcats to bed with a five-run bottom inning.
Junior Jadyn McNealy, redshirt senior Isaac Webb, Nottlemann and redshirt junior Kam Koester each collected two hits in the game. McNealy, Webb, and Wesslund tallied two RBI each. McNealy swiped a pair of bases to set the Pitt State single season record with 40 stolen bases. Graduate student starter Zach Voss pitched into the seventh inning to pick up his ninth win of the season.
The final game of the series was another tightly contested Gorilla win, as Pitt State 10-9. It looked like it would be all Rogers State early on, as the Hillcats scored six runs in the third inning, but Pitt State was able to chip away at the lead, scoring eight runs across three innings to take a 9-7 lead. The Hillcats would score a single run in the seventh and ninth to tie it up, but Pitt State would once again find an answer in the bottom of the ninth to take the win.
Senior Dagen Brewer had a two-run single in the fifth inning that staked the Gorillas to an 8-7 lead. Webb, Nottlemann and Wesslund also had two RBI each in the game. Bacon scored three times, while McNealy and Branson added two runs apiece. Bacon delivered a walk off double to score senior Andrew Branson with the game-winning run
The Gorillas will return to the field for the last batch of regular season games on Tuesday, when they travel to play the Newman Jets, before hitting the road again for a three-game series on the weekend against the Washburn Ichabods.