Red Raiders take Kansas series

This past weekend, Texas Tech Baseball made their presence known in Lawrence, taking two of three from the Jayhawks, outscoring Kansas by a combined score of 41-12 to win their second straight Big 12 series, taking their overall record to 24-6 on the year.

Friday night the Red Raiders took game one by a score of 8-2, but the score really wasn’t a true story of the game. For a good bit of this one, Kansas had a lead and Tech scored seven of their eight runs after the sixth inning. However this one was close the whole time because of the pitching of Tech starter Andrew Morris. Morris went eight innings giving up two runs on five hits, and threw 101 pitches. Morris moves to 3-0 on the season.

Jace Jung and Cole Stilwell homered, while Kurt Wilson doubled in two runs in the ninth for some insurance runs, and the offense was there when it was needed.

Saturday was a football game. No, not really but if you looked at the final score you would’ve had to make a guess as Tech took this one four touchdowns to a safety (28-2) for a second time this year. Brandon Birdsell went five innings allowing zero hits and eight strikeouts for the second time this year, throwing 65 pitches and by that point, the Red Raiders were up by a score of 11-0. Tech ended up scoring eight runs in the sixth to make it 19-0, and the game was never in doubt, as everyone hit, everyone scored, and fun was had by all.

Sunday, was again a rough game for Tech as Kansas got some revenge for Saturday with an 8-5 victory over the Red Raiders. Mason Molina got the loss and he has just been on the rough end of some bad breaks this season. I watched some of this one and when I did it was a frustrating one to watch as I felt like most of Kansas’ runs were scored with two outs or two strikes or both. It felt like Tech was so close to avoiding giving up crooked numbers in the first and fourth innings, but just couldn’t shut the door. Other than the pitching for Tech, the story was Ryan Vanderhei, as he held Tech to two runs over six innings and the Red Raiders just couldn’t string enough runs together late to come back in this one.

Nevertheless, Tech wins the series and jumped to #4 in the College Baseball rankings, now they look forward to a two-game mid-week series against Grand Canyon out in Phoenix.

Grand Canyon was the pre-season favorite to win the WAC this year, and the Antelopes currently sit at 18-11 overall and 10-2 in conference play. With Tech being #4, this will be the highest ranked team that GCU plays all year, so there is no doubt that even though it is a mid-week series, the Antelopes will be looking to make a statement against a top five team.

GCU is led in every major hitting category by sophomore shortstop Jacob Wilson. He leads in average (.393), homers (8), RBIs (35), and hits (46). It is a mid-week series so the pitchers are kind of a toss up but its possible to see Daniel Avitia and Hunter Omlid to start these two games.

The Red Raiders are also in an interesting spot in terms of mid-week pitching, as last week Chase Hampton was scratched hours before his start due to illness, which led the way to Andrew Devine’s best outing since 2020 going four innings allowing one run on two hits in a 19-1 rout of SFA. Austin Becker has been the Wednesday starter all year in these two-game mid-weeks, so realistically it could be Hampton, Devine, or Becker to start two games this week so we will see how Coach Tadlock decides to use his bullpen and starters this week.

The games this week will be available on ESPN+ as the past games have, however, remember the time difference is two hours now after the time change.

Game 1: Tuesday April 5 @ GCU- 8:00 p.m. central, 6:00 p.m. local on ESPN+ and TTSN Radio.

Game 2: Wednesday April 6 @ GCU- 4:00 p.m. central, 2:00 p.m. local on ESPN+ and TTSN Radio.

Wreck’Em.