Oregon Diamond Ducks: Friday Recaps

It’s an all Ducks vs Spartans matchup this weekend on both diamonds as Oregon softball hosts Michigan State at Jane Sanders Stadium and Oregon baseball travels to East Lansing to take on Michigan State.

Baseball

To open the series against the Spartans Oregon sent ace Grayson Grinsell to the mound and early on he had his usual ace stuff. After Oregon’s bats went down 1-2-3 in order in the first Grinsell pitched a scoreless inning in the bottom half in part to closing the inning out with a nifty pickoff of a MSU batter at 2nd.

In the 2nd inning Oregon was able to get a runner aboard and was trying to use some speed on the paths to create a run. But a check swing line out on the attempted steal allowed Michigan State to get the easy double play and thwart the Ducks attempt at manufacturing some offence. In the bottom half of the inning disaster struck for the Ducks defense as what should have been a fly ball to end the inning was was misplayed by Anson Aroz allowing the Spartans runner from 1st to score an unearned run.

After neither team was able to get anything going in the 3rd inning Grayson Grinsell picked off his second MSU runner of the game to end the 4th. This writer cannot confirm if the Spartans base runners have learned their lesson yet.

To the 5th inning where once again the Ducks bats could not get anything going and Michigan State was able to extend their lead with a solo home run to make it 2-0. The Ducks were not only not scoring, but they weren’t even getting on the bases which in my basic knowledge of baseball makes it difficult to win games. Luckily Grinsell was keeping this game close by keeping Michigan State off the board as well.

The Ducks offence couldn’t put any kind of real threat together in the final two innings and that would be all from East Lansing on Friday night as the Ducks fell 2-0 to drop the series opener. This despite the strong performance from Grinsell who has now pitched back to back complete games.

Hopefully the Ducks bats and fully rested bullpen can bounce back on Saturday when they are back in action for game 2 of the series.

Softball

Oregon Softball was taking on Michigan State as well but in Oregon at Jane Sanders stadium. Coming into this series the Ducks magic number to clinch the Big 10 regular season title and number 1 seed for the conference tournament was 2. Meaning either 2 Oregon wins or 2 UCLA losses in the final weekend would do the trick.

Oregon got off to a strong start with a nice 6-4-3 double play to end the 1st

However the nice start would not last long as the Spartans were able to get to Lyndsey Grein and put up a whopping 6 runs in the 2nd. 4 of these runs being charged to Grein before Sokolsky had to come in early for relief. Sokolsky was able to stop the bleeding and then pitched a 1-2-3 3rd inning but the Ducks were still in a massive hole early in the game.

The Ducks would start climbing out of said hole in the 3rd inning when they would load the bases for Kedre Luschar who would deliver a 2 run single to get Oregon on the board.

Elise Sokolsky was doing a great job keeping Oregon in the game pitching scoreless innings in the 4th and 5th. It was the 5th inning were the Ducks would take another bite out of the Michigan State lead thanks to a 2 out triple from Paige Sinicki.

Followed up by a a single from Kedre Luschar for her 3rd RBI of the game.

Sokolsky would continue to hold up her end of the deal with scoreless innings in the 6th and 7th innings. Sadly the Ducks offence could not muster up any more runs and the comeback bid would come up short. Ducks fall 6-4 to the Spartans to drop game 1 of the series.

Thankfully out of town UCLA also dropped its opening game of the weekend series to Northwestern so the Ducks remain in control of the Big Ten and are now 1 win away from securing the Big Ten regular season title.

The Ducks are back in action at 2:00PM today. With the simple stakes of, win and the regular season title belongs to Oregon.