Brandeis baseball played a series at home over the weekend against UAA Conference opponent Washington University in St. Louis. Despite playing on home turf, the Judges were swept in the four-game conference match-up, bringing their record to 9-13.
The series started off rough for the Judges. The first game, played at night on Friday, April 5, saw strong defensive play from both teams through fourth innings, before slipping from the Judges’ control. A three-run fifth inning granted WashU momentum for the rest of the game, finalizing in a seven-run ninth inning that put the visiting team over the Judges in a 0-15 game.
The Judges pitching gave the WashU Bears 17 total hits, with the Judges hitting responding with just three.
The Judges would recover the next time and put up a stronger defense against WashU’s hitting. In the second game of the series, hosted on the morning of Saturday, April 6, Brandeis contested the 18th-ranked team to the finish line, driving the visiting team into an extra inning.
In the top of the first inning, the Bears scored off a pair of two unearned runs. However, the Judges quickly responded in the bottom of the first. The Judges tacked on two runs as well. One occurred off the bat of center fielder Dan Frey ’21, who singled off a WashU error and secured an RBI by getting Victor Oppenheimer ’20 to home plate. Mike Khoury ’21 scored the second run of the inning off a sacrifice fly from Luke Hall ’21.
The Judges took the lead in the third inning off an earned run. Isaac Fossas ’21 earned the RBI after doubling to center field to get Khoury to home plate.
Brandeis held on to the lead for almost the entire game but dropped a run in the top of the ninth inning on a sacrifice fly from the Bears, pushing the game into extra innings after Brandeis couldn’t secure a run in the bottom of the ninth. The Bears earned the solo run in the tenth inning that would ultimately push them to victory.
The last two games featured high run tallies from the Bears that the Judges couldn’t combat. Brandeis lost the two games 4-10 and 0-11, respectively.
The Judges snapped the losing streak during the week, however, when they played Newbury College on Wednesday, April 10. The game gave the team some earned confidence after scoring 19 runs while only dropping four to the visiting team in the only game of the series.
The Judges are set to return to conference play on Friday, April 19 when they are scheduled to host NYU in a four-game series. In the meantime, Brandeis is scheduled to play in a couple single-game series to prepare for the conference match-up.
