Arizona State Baseball Climbs To No. 9 In Latest Rankings
By Kody Acevedo
The Arizona State Baseball team started to 2015 season off with a bang, climbing 10 spots to No. 9 in this week’s Collegiate Baseball Poll.
With perhaps one of the toughest schedules in college baseball to start the season, the Sun Devils definitely turned heads after taking the series two games to one over No. 5 Oklahoma State.
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As fate would have it, ASU opened the season with a new coach and a new stadium Friday night and nine innings wasn’t enough to tell the story. Fans were treated to an extra inning of ‘free baseball’ and for those who stuck around, they certainly got their money’s worth. Colby Woodmansee capped off opening night with a walk-off home run in the bottom of the 10th inning to seal the 3-2 win over Oklahoma State.
Starting pitcher Ryan Kellogg earned his first victory of the year. Kellogg went five innings, while allowing seven hits and three runs, which was good enough to keep his team well in the game. Ryan Burr worked his way out of a bases-loaded jam in the eighth and pitched a scoreless ninth to earn his first save of the year.
The Woodmansee blast gave head coach Tracy Smith his first win as the Sun Devil skipper and the Sun Devil’s first win at their new home, Phoenix Muni. Friday night’s victory was matched with a 5-3 win for Arizona State in game two to win the series over Oklahoma State.
Sunday’s game three did not go the Sun Devil’s way. They dropped the potential sweep with a 9-8 defeat to the Cowboys. Following an early 6-0 deficit, ASU slowly chipped away at Oklahoma State and pulled within one run on another Woodmansee home run in the 7th inning, but were unable to get anything across in the 8th and 9th innings.
Despite the loss, ASU made a lot of noise in a very short amount of time. Not only did the team earn recognition of their work with a solid no. 9 ranking, right-handed pitcher Ryan Burr took home the honors of PAC-12 Pitcher of the Week. Burr earned the win in Friday night’s game and a save in Saturday’s game.
The momentum will definitely have to cary into this week if the Sun Devils want to see the success continue. Coming up, ASU will face the Oklahoma Sooners in a midweek matchup on Wednesday night in Phoenix. The Sooners will be a mere warm-up for what lies ahead, a three-game weekend series against the No. 1 ranked TCU Horned Frogs, no easy task by any means.
TCU completely dominated over the weekend.They are coming off a three-game sweep over Southern Illinois. In that series, TCU scored 32 runs on 39 hits in the three games combined. Their pitching staff shut out Southern Illinois on Friday and Sunday.
Realistically, the talent of ASU supersedes that of Southern Illinois, but the talent of TCU is nothing to be taken lightly. If the opening weekend wasn’t a hard enough test for the 2015 Sun Devils, this no. 1 TCU team will show the Sun Devils’ true colors.