ASU Baseball: Sun Devils Outlast Cougars; Pick Up Third Conference Victory

ASU baseball rides quick start to a 6-5 victory over Washington State; snaps four-game conference losing streak.

ASU baseball did not score first in any of its three games over the weekend at California, but against Washington State tonight the Sun Devils were able to grab an early 5-0 lead after the second inning.

“I thought it was important we jump out early,” said Tracy Smith after the game, “I’d like to have seen us extend the lead, but none the less we did enough to win tonight.”

The early scoring was set in motion by Gage Canning beating out a throw for a leadoff infield single in the first inning. Andrew Shaps walked after Canning. An errant throw in an attempt to double off Canning on a line drive moved both runners into scoring position.

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The Sun Devils have struggled mightily with runners in scoring position this season. Tyler Williams and Taylor Lane changed that in the first inning. Both players captured a two-out RBI hit in the first inning to give ASU a 2-0 lead.

After making a stellar over the head catch in right field to save a run in the top half the second inning, Canning would drive a ball off the scoreboard in right-center field for a three-run home run in the bottom half. This gave Sun Devil Baseball its first comfortable lead in a game in a while.

“I just saw a hanging breaking ball… I saw it well and hit it,” said the sophomore Canning on his home run which gave the Sun Devils a 5-0 lead.

The ASU hitters were able to go after A.J. Block, Washington State’s starting pitcher, and get him out of the game early. The Cougars’ freshman pitcher was pulled after surrendering back to back hits to begin the fourth and exited the game with five of his six runs given up being earned.

Chaz Montoya ran into a little trouble while pitching the fifth. The freshman, four days removed from his last start, gave up four singles and a walk in his last inning. A heads up throw by senior catcher Zach Cerbo nailed a runner napping at second, and limited the damage to just two runs, keeping ASU ahead 6-3.

“It wasn’t sharp,” said Smith on Montoya’s pitching performance, “but he competed… I’ll take that, he did his job.”

Montoya was replaced by Alec Marsh who struggled to throw strikes out of the bullpen in the sixth inning. Marsh retired two batters but also surrendered two earned runs. The ASU lead at this point had shrunk to just one run.

With the score 6-5, Smith had faith in his sophomore pitcher, Connor Higgins, to come in and shut the door on the Washington State offense. Higgins would do just that, striking out four over 3.1 innings, and most importantly giving up no runs and no walks to the scrappy Cougar offense.

“His best fastballs were late in the game… that tells me there’s a little bit of a competitive fire in there,” Smith added, “more guys need to model that quite frankly.”

Higgins gave a nod to his catcher, Zach Cerbo, for helping create that competitive fire saying Cerbo will sometimes pat his chest after calling a fastball to help challenge him to be on the attack when he faces a batter.

The Cougars threatened to score the tying run with a leadoff single to start the eighth, but Conor Higgins did a spectacular job at keeping the score where it was. Higgins struck out the last batter of the eighth inning and proceeded to have a 1,2,3 ninth inning to close out the game and give the Sun Devils a 6-5 win.

Next: Softball Uses Power Bats in Victory

ASU (14-18, 3-10) will attempt to secure its first conference series win tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. PST against Washington State (15-15, 2-8). The game can be streamed live on the Arizona State live stream.

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