In what’s been the most impressive stretch of the UConn baseball season, the program continued its winning ways with two straight wins over both the UMass Minutemen and Hofstra Pride to increase their winning streak to five.
What was perhaps the most impressive aspect of both games was the way the Huskies accomplished the wins. In both contests, the Huskies had no shortage of offense and took care of business in seven innings.
Starting with Connecticut’s Tuesday matchup against UMass, the team was riding hot after their incredible series win over Big East powerhouse Georgetown. A win over their East Coast rival at Elliot Ballpark would continue that success, and that’s exactly what went down.
Incredibly, the Hook C were down at one point in this game. With Gabe Van Emon tabbed to lead his squad to victory on the mound, he would not disappoint. The Endicott transfer would toss six innings of two run ball, striking out eight in the process. After the Minutemen would put their lone two runs on the board, the graduate pitcher would get a much-needed boost from the bats on Tuesday.
“It was nice to see him work through some stuff and just get back out there and have a little fun,” said head coach Jim Penders. “He looked a little tentative early and I think he got back into rhythm.”
With the team down 2-0, they responded in a massive way, scoring seven runs in the fourth inning. The biggest moment of that inning would come from Luke Broadhurst, who would take a pitch deep for a three-run home run.
Those seven runs were all that the team needed, but amazingly, they piled on five more. The fifth inning was defined by doubles, as the team collected three doubles from Paul Tammaro, Korey Morton and Bryan Padilla to collect a ridiculous 13 total runs in the game, with 12 hits to show for that effort.
Due to such an incredible offensive effort and a 10-run lead, the game ended 13-3 for UConn.
One would think that UConn couldn’t top their 13-run effort from Tuesday’s win, but impressively, they did just that in their matchup against Hofstra on Wednesday.
Unlike Tuesday’s game, this one took a collective effort from the Hook C pitching staff, who rolled out Garrett Coe to start the game. Unfortunately for the Huskies, the senior left-hander got into a jam early, surrendering three runs and being pulled after three innings of work.
On the bright side for Connecticut, their offense once again looked like a well-oiled machine.
The Hook C simply couldn’t be stopped in the bottom of the second inning, embarrassing the Pride for 10 runs in that inning alone. The team utterly balled out, taking Hofstra starter Penn Sealey out of the game in just two innings. The ridiculous offensive output of that inning was be capped off by a Maddix Dalena two-run bomb to electrify the Elliot crowd.
While the team had a sizable lead, they were far from done. They capitalized on another fielding error by Hofstra to take an 11-3 lead, putting this game closer and closer toward a seven-inning decision. What ended up being the dagger of Wednesday’s contest would be a three-run fifth inning, highlighted by a pair of doubles from both Tammaro and Morton.
With a firm 14-3 lead, and some excellent bullpen pitching to go along with it, the squad secured the win at Elliot.
With this team riding hot, they’ll head into a weekend series with Villanova in Storrs.