Big eighth inning powers Hogs past NU
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BY CURT McKEEVER / Lincoln Journal Star
It had already been an extremely long eighth inning for Mike Anderson at Haymarket Park on Wednesday afternoon.
In the top half, Arkansas had knocked the wheels from under his Nebraska baseball team by scoring six runs to snap a tie and hand the 22nd-ranked Huskers a 9-4 loss, their first in 15 games.
That didn’t faze Anderson nearly as much, though, as nearly having his head taken off in the bottom half of the inning when Bryce Nimmo sent a liner whizzing right at the third-base coaching box, sending Anderson into a backward somersault.
“Right underneath my chin,” Anderson said. “You want to talk about Coach Van Horn and Coach Anderson this week? That’s the way our players think. Let’s just tattoo those guys. They’re coming at us, man. That’ll humble you real quick.”
Almost as quickly as the team led by former NU coach Dave Van Horn did Husker relievers Mike Nesseth and Zach Herr in the eighth inning.
Nesseth, who in his first seven appearances had not given up a run while notching two wins and a save, yielded two hits, a walk and three runs in the eighth. Herr, who sported a 1.74 earn-run average in eight outings, failed to get an out while allowing three hits, a walk and three more runs.
“Good hitters,” Nesseth said of the Razorbacks. “Great fastball hitters.”
The best of that bunch Wednesday was Ryan Cisterna, who smoked a 1-0 fastball from Nesseth well beyond the left-field wall for a two-run, tiebreaking homer with one out in the eighth.
Cisterna had struck out 21 times in 52 at-bats this season before his eighth-inning at-bat. But he came through with his fourth homer, on just his ninth hit of the year.
“He’s all or nothing. We know that,” Van Horn said of the junior catcher. “Honestly, we saw that in the fall. (But) if you make a mistake and he hits it, he’s got a good chance to hit it out of the park. And he did. He hammered that ball.”
Nesseth said the pitch Cisterna crushed was well-placed down in the zone. But he also admitted that the shot knocked him for a brief loop.
“I’ve got to try to gain my composure a little bit, (and) I kind of rushed it a little bit after that home run,” he said.
After Cisterna gave Arkansas its first lead, Nesseth walked No. 9 hitter Andrew Darr and the Huskers called on Herr.
The crowd of 4,295 then watched Chase Leavitt double in a run, Brett Eibner follow with an RBI triple and Logan Forsythe add a double to make it 8-3.
The Razorbacks (12-7) got a final run when Nebraska botched a pickoff play.
By then, the sting Van Horn felt from his team having lost five of its previous six games was pretty much gone.
He did, however, still feel the pain of having been drilled in the left thigh by a second-inning liner hit by Tim Smalling.
“I didn’t want anybody to know, (but) that hurt pretty good,” Van Horn said. “He asked, ‘Coach, did I get you good?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll show you in two days when it’s purple.’”
To Van Horn, it’ll be a war wound he’s proud to wear.
“We needed something to change the way we feel heading down to Baton Rouge,” he said, referring to Arkansas’ weekend series at LSU.
Nebraska, meanwhile, gets back into Big 12 Conference play by playing host to Oklahoma in a three-game series starting Friday.
“We hadn’t seen anything like that for a long time,” Anderson said of the Razorbacks’ outburst. “More than mistakes on our part, I thought they did a good job. They hit the ball and hit it hard. It’s a good team. We’re going to go back to work and go try to start it again.”
Reach Curt McKeever at 473-7441 or cmckeever@journalstar.com.
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