Boerema Silences WVU Bats, Mountaineers Eliminated From Tourney
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MORGANTOWN -- After opening the Big 12 Tournament on Tuesday with what was perhaps his team's most indifferent game of the season, especially considering the circumstance of tournament play and with a potential bid to the NCAAs considered a near certainty, Coach Randy Mazey was looking for signs that his team would be juiced for an elimination game on Wednesday against Kansas State.
If they had sleep walked through Tuesday's 1:30 p.m. game a day earlier, it figured to be that an early wake-up call would hardly suffice to ignite them for a 9 a.m. Central Time first pitch.
That was why he, as they walked into Globe Life Stadium for their pregame preparations, the veteran Mazey, who is retiring after this season, felt relieved as they entered the major league stadium that is home to the Texas Rangers.
What he saw from his team was that it was loose and easy going, like normal.
"If you think it's too early, our guys just got to see Jacob deGrom and Josh Young, two big leaguers, playing catch in the outfield," Mazey said during his pre-game radio interview. "A lot of our guys said, 'See, if we hadn't played the early game we wouldn't have gotten to see that.'"
Certainly, he figured, they were not intimidated by the Tuesday loss.
"They are all excited," Mazey reported. "They just saw Santa Claus."
Turns out, though, it wasn't Santa Claus at all that they saw, but, instead, "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas", to say nothing of their dream to play their way to a Big 12 championship through the losers bracket.
He wore not a fuzzy red outfit and his nose wasn't quite red like a cherry under the baseball cap with KS on it and it wasn't a bag of goodies he had on his back but instead big No. 26 on his back.
His name was Owen Boerema and after WVU had its way with him in a three-run first inning, he took them apart piece by piece by piece.
While Mazey made a rather puzzling decision not to pitch his best pitcher, Derek Clark, in this elimination game and instead opted to send a parade of pitchers to the mound, Boerema threw a 131-pitch complete game.
Why no Clark, a diminutive left-hander who this season is 7-2 with a 3.05 ERA and an All-Big 12 selection, for WVU?
Mazey explained it this way before the game:
"You are going to see some guys pitch today you wouldn't normally get to see pitch, but we're not going to panic. We never do. We're not going rush a Derek Clark out there on short rest or anything like that.
"We could, if I felt our NCAA Tournament life was at stake, but I feel pretty good about that. We're just going to let guys throw in their normal rotation and hope for the best."
Clark would have had four days rest going to the mound, but Mazey decided to rely on caution.
He may be right that his NCAA Tournament resume is solid, but he's thought that before and has been disappointed and two rather dismal conference tournament defeats do nothing to make the committee confidently push its button.
The truth is that WVU's recent Big 12 history has been dreadful. Since the tournament moved to Globe Life Field three years ago, they are 0-6 while being outscored, 36-19.
Mazey stood by his decision to pass up Clark even after he saw the results of the game.
"If I didn't feel really confident we were going to play next weekend (in the NCAAs) you would have seen Derek Clark today," he said when asked about the decision to start Hamilton Oliver.
"It's a pretty good feeling to think you still have next weekend to play. If that's the case, it's a lot harder to win this 10-team tournament than to win a four-team regional and the next step in the progression of West Virginia baseball is to win a regional.
"I would never have told these guys on the front end we were doing that, but it was always in my mind that we need Derek and (his other weekend starter) Tyler Switalski to do that."
Boerema's performance was courageous, as he not only survived that first-inning onslaught, but got stronger as the game went on. He wound up allowing only four hits, striking out 10 while walking two.
Meanwhile, the collection of pitchers Mazey concocted for this one walked 11 batters and threw one run-scoring wild pitch and would have had another had the runner on third base been able to see that the pitch had gotten away clear to the backstop.
The Mountaineers took their 3-0 lead into the fourth inning with Oliver, who had not started a game this season, cruising along until the earth tore open under him and swallowed him and three successors up in a 7-run inning that took more than half an hour to play.
Mazey had confidence in Oliver when he chose him to start.
"When you get in a situation like this with an elimination game and your tournament hopes on the line, you want to give the ball to a guy who has bought in and is going to give you 100%," Mazey said.
"Ham's been great all year (he had a 3.72 ERA through 19 appearances), he's been positive, he's pitched in different roles and we knew he was only going to go only three or four innings," Mazey went on, adding, "if only ol' Coach Maz had taken him out after three."
Those were three good innings, but the fourth became a seven-run disaster that included four hits and six walks.
"We just gave them too many free passes in that seven-run inning," said Mazey, who said he wasn't disappointed in his team's offense as they hit the ball hard but, as so often happens, they were "at 'em" balls that produce nothing but an at bat in the box score.
"I'm going to leave here positive about our offense," Mazey said. "We only got three hits yesterday and today we had three hits in our first four hitters. We made some adjustments in our approach; they followed the plan but we just couldn't get them to fall."