WVU’s Reese Bassinger winds up to deliver during a game this season.

MORGANTOWN — No matter how much they try to juice up the game of baseball, in the end it is a game of arms.

You can juice the ball or juice the hitters, but baseball championships are decided by guys named Gibson and Koufax and Seaver and Palmer.

That’s why they stand on a hill in the middle of the field.

Doesn’t matter where you play, doesn’t matter or what your age is. That never changes and so it has been proven once again at West Virginia, where the Mountaineers were looking peril in the eye late Saturday in the afternoon against Texas Tech.

They had dropped the first game of a doubleheader to the Red Raiders, had seen their manager ejected, and then in the second game had lost their centerfielder to an ejection and their starting pitcher to injury after two innings.

What had been a season without any real complaints that included winning streaks of 14 and 13 games while opening a three-game lead in the Big 12 suddenly had reached a moment of truth and the truth to step forward was that if you have heart and combine it with arms you can withstands anything.

On Saturday, Reese Bassinger had come out of the bullpen and pitched seven innings of relief to earn his sixth victory against no defeats and then on Sunday Jack Kartsonas was in charge from the start and combined with Carson Estridge for a seven-hit shutout to chase away the clouds and let the sun shine again upon the Mountaineers as they sang “Country Roads” to an appreciative crowd of 3,384 fans at Kendrick Family Ballpark.

Make no mistake, WVU had to combine the strong arms of Bassinger, Konsontas and Estridge with the heart of a champion to turn what had become the season’s first two-game losing streak into the latest two-game winning streak and first-year coach Steve Sabins understood that better than anyone.

“I don’t want to overemphasize a game,” Sabins had said on Saturday evening. “It just felt like how things had gone from the very first inning that this was one of those games where a weaker-mentality team could have said, ‘This isn’t our day. We got screwed. The umpire didn’t treat us right. The calls weren’t right. We got ejected. A player got ejected. There were so many areas where a weaker team could have cashed it in as a bad Saturday after rain delays and lightning. I am just extremely proud of the mentality.”

They were ejected, not dejected. In fact, you might say they were injected with a healthy shot of pride that drove them to take the series, a series they had to grab to stay on the right track.

The Mountaineers neither sulked nor pressed.

They simply played baseball the way the game is supposed to be played and it started with Bassinger, who has answered every call this year.

“What Bass did was special. What a performance,” Sabins said. “I want to cry when I think how much that guy poured his heart and soul out there on the mound for the Mountaineers.”

“You don’t expect to go seven,” Bassinger said. You just try to go one inning at a time. The first inning didn’t work out so great but they let me ride it out. You just go one pitch at a time.”

Sabins wasn’t about to apply a quick hook on Bassinger.

“There were times we could have potentially made some changes, but we didn’t,” Sabins explained “We have great relievers in the bullpen, but in my gut, I kept going, ‘I like Bass here. I like Bass here. I like Bass here.'”

Each inning Sabins checked on how Bassinger was feeling, not because he was looking for a reason to take him out but because he was looking for a reason to leave him in.

“Sabins asked me after every inning, ‘How you feeling? How you feeling?’ I told him ‘Great, fantastic.’ I was just trying to keep myself in the game.”

No one had to say very much to Kartsonas on Sunday as the transfer from Kent State who has taken over the Sunday starting spot and has a 1.01 ERA as a starter as evidence of why. He worked seven innings of shutout ball, giving up five hits while striking out seven and walking no one.

Combined with Bassinger’s relief work over the weekend, the two pitched 14 innings, gave up 13 hits, two runs, walked no one — repeat, walked no one — and struck out 11.

If you can imagine it, they threw 181 pitches of which 126 were strikes. I’ll do the math for you, that’s 7 out of 10 pitches being strikes.

“Kartsonas has been excellent consistently throughout the season, regardless of role,” Sabins said after Sunday’s game. “He’s got a 1.59 ERA for the year. I think the numbers speak for themselves but the kid, the personality, the persona, the confidence all match up with the ERA and the number.

“It’s one of the best seasons being put together in the 10 years I’ve been here. He really likes to compete in the moment. It’s almost every week now where you know it’s going to be a fight. He will go into the game and fight for the Mountaineers with everything he has.

“You can’t ask for anything else. You know what you are going to get from a personality and compete standpoint.”