Abeita, Nimmo lift Huskers past KU

Bryce Nimmo was the perfect poster boy for what coach Mike Anderson wants his Nebraska baseball team to look like after a game.

The entire front side of Nimmo’s jersey was stained with dirt, as well as the right thigh and both knees on his pants.

“The laundry guy doesn’t really like me too much,” said Nimmo, who helped spark the Huskers to an 8-6 win against Kansas at overflowing Haymarket Park on Saturday.

Indeed.

The Huskers’ senior center fielder — who had three singles, scored a run and drove in the decisive one by legging out an infield hit in the sixth — also sported a mark on the seat of his pants. That came courtesy of a running-and-falling catch he made on the warning track on a drive hit by Preston Land with two runners on and two out in the fifth.

“That was unnecessary,” Nimmo said.

Anderson might beg to differ, because it took another all-out effort for his team to come through in the clutch for the second straight day against the Jayhawks.

NU — which rallied to win 7-6 Friday by holding KU scoreless over the final four innings — clinched its fifth Big 12 Conference series of the season by again winning the majority of the late-inning battles.

After Kansas’ Ben Afenir hit a two-run homer off Thad Weber to tie the game 4-4 in the fifth, the Huskers answered immediately with a run in the bottom half to take the lead for good.

Nimmo’s opposite-field, hit-and-run single advanced Ben Kline to third, and, two batters later, Jake Opitz pulled a grounder to first base to let Kline score.

Nebraska, which had gotten a fourth-inning grand slam from Mitch Abeita, scored twice in the sixth when DJ Belfonte doubled in Craig Corriston and Nimmo hit a chopper up the middle and beat the throw for a two-out infield RBI single.

Kansas scored a run in both the seventh and eighth innings off reliever Mike Nesseth. But junior lefty Zach Herr — given an insurance run in the eighth when Kline doubled and scored after back-to-back infield singles by Jake Mort and Opitz — threw hitless ball over the final 12/3 innings to earn his third save.

“All of them have got really good speed, and they come up with those clutch hits,” Kansas third baseman Tony Thompson said of the Huskers.

In other words, the Jayhawks, like many other NU opponents, walked off the field thinking they were a hit here, a pitch there away from changing the outcome.

“That’s kind of what we do,” Anderson said after ninth-ranked NU improved to 28-6-1 overall and13-3-1 in the Big 12 to keep close to conference leader Texas A&M.

“(We) pitched well enough and hit well enough just to get it done. Again, I don’t think there’s going to be any team that walks out of here and says, ‘Wow, we just got overpowered.’ But let’s just keep doing what we’re doing.”

On Saturday, NU did it in front of 8,697 fans — the third-largest home crowd in school history.

“We’re very pleased to be up 2-0 like this,” said Nimmo, who will try and help the Huskers notch their third sweep of a conference opponent with Sunday’s 1:05 p.m. series finale. “All you can really say is we’ve been battling hard for the past two days, they’ve been battling hard, and we’ve been coming up with some clutch hits in the right times. That’s the difference.”

Reach Curt McKeever at 473-7441 or cmckeever@journalstar.com.