Box Score
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Unlike everyone else at Rosenblatt Stadium, UCLA barely broke a sweat.
The Bruins scored five first-inning runs Saturday against TCU and then rode the stone-cold pitching of Trevor Bauer to a 10-3 victory before 10,907 steamy spectators, putting them in the best-of-three College World Series championship series that starts Monday.
Bauer (12-3) — who struck out 13 in eight innings while allowing three runs, two earned, on four hits — didn't allow the Horned Frogs to apply any heat.
“That was huge,” Bauer said of the first inning. “You can go out there and focus on throwing strikes and not putting people on base. In a tighter game, you have to be a little more careful.”
Bryan Holaday's second homer of the game — his fourth of the CWS and his third against UCLA — got TCU within 6-3 in the fifth, but UCLA got two runs in the sixth and two more in a seventh inning that included Dean Espy's leadoff homer. The Bruins had Gerrit Cole, one of their three ace pitchers, warm up a couple of times, but never had to use him.
“It turned out to be the best scenario we could draw up,” UCLA coach John Savage said. “Cole will start on Monday, and he got his (scheduled) bullpen work in (while warming up), and we were very fortunate because we were going to go to him if Trevor ran into any problems.”
TCU starter Kyle Winkler (12-3), who pitched 7.2 shutout innings in the Horned Frogs' super regional clinching win over Texas, didn't bring his best stuff with him to Omaha. After pitching a season-low 2.2 innings in Monday's loss to the Bruins, he got one of the quickest hooks in CWS history Saturday, leaving after three batters (hit by pitch, single, Blair Dunlap's three-run homer).
“I don't think he had it from the get-go,” TCU coach Jim Schlossnagle said. “Hit the leadoff hitter, didn't throw a strike and had the chopper go through on the 3-1 count. He tried to find his breaking ball since he didn't have command of his fastball and they hit it out. He just didn't have much of anything.”
UCLA (51-15) added two more first-inning runs against Paul Gerrish on an RBI double by Jeff Gelalich and a run-scoring single by Espy.
“Obviously Winkler is a great pitcher and we knew that coming in,” Dunlap said. “Basically we just wanted to be aggressive and have competitive at-bats all the way through. We knew if he would get pitches out over the plate and we stayed aggressive, that we'd be in good shape.”
It started well enough for TCU (54-14), as Holaday homered in the top of the first.
“It was a struggle the first couple of innings,” Bauer said. “I just wanted to go pitch to pitch and get my team as deep (into the game) as I could. That mentality helped me along and then I kind of found my mechanics and got into a groove.”
UCLA made it 6-1 on Cody Regis' RBI double, but TCU got a run back in the fourth on Joe Weik's sacrifice fly.
Holaday's second homer made it 6-3 in the fifth and reliever Kaleb Merck escaped a jam in the bottom half of the inning by striking out the side.
“When we got it to 6-3, I thought if we could keep it there, maybe get one more great at-bat ... then Merck punched out a guy (with runners on) first and third, and I thought we had a chance,” Schlossnagle said. “But Bauer was just too good.”
Bauer struck out eight of the final 15 he faced, including the last four. His best inning might have been the eighth, even though his pitch count reached 135 in brutal conditions, when he struck out the top three hitters in the TCU order.
The quirky Bauer, who pitched with a long-sleeved undershirt despite the weather, overcame the conditions. His sleeves were so sweat-drenched, he said, that it kept him cool when the wind blew.
“The eighth inning was really an unreal inning,” Savage said. “The guy was on top of his game.”
Contact the writer:
444-1027, rob.white@owh.com
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