Huskers pound Creighton in Omaha
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BY CURT McKEEVER / Lincoln Journal Star
OMAHA — It was really bad luck if you needed a bathroom break after the top of the fifth inning of Wednesday’s Nebraska-Creighton baseball game at Rosenblatt Stadium.
After the Huskers spent 50 minutes producing 13 runs on a night that beer vendors dream about, you weren’t about to rush to the front of the line.
“By the time I looked up I was one of the outs and we were almost coming up on three times through the order,” Husker left fielder Nick Sullivan said. “So it was a lot of fun.”
Good luck trying to convince the Bluejays of that.
En route to a 16-7 victory, their second against Creighton in two nights, the Huskers recreated a scene synonymous with college baseball domination.
As 13-run innings go, the last time NU got that kind of production before the opponent could secure three outs was against Chicago State in a 50-3 win during the 1999 season that still stands as the NCAA record for most runs in a game.
Yeah, to Creighton and the blue-clad fans among the 9,044 in attendance, the top of the fifth must have seemed to drag longer than the final 4½ innings combined.
“I’ve seen a lot of different things this year, but it’s another one of those I haven’t seen in a long, long time,” Bluejays coach Ed Servais said. “You’ve got to give them some credit. They were just throwing balls out there for extra-base hit after extra-base hit.”
While sending 17 batters to the plate, Nebraska had eight hits (five of them doubles), three walks, two hit batters and two sacrifice flies.
First baseman Darin Ruf’s first error of the season, a wild throw to the plate after fielding a bouncer hit by Sullivan, gave NU its first two runs in the marathon inning.
By the time it ended, five pitchers — Zak Moore, T.J. Roemmich, Matt Patterson, Bob Lackovic and Kevin Dooley — had taken the mound for Creighton.
By the time the game ended, the Huskers had totaled a school-record 10 doubles and produced season highs for runs and hits (18).
“I don’t have anything for that, other than I was proud of our kids,” NU coach Mike Anderson said. “I just kept thinking there were a lot of great things that happened with that inning: A lot of two-strike approaches. A lot of base hits the other way.
“Too many good things to let that inning be forgotten, and not from the standpoint of patting yourself on the back, (but) from the standpoint of, ‘What did you do right in that inning that you could continue on a consistent basis?’”
Sullivan knows it would be silly to expect another outburst like that again this season. But the fact that the Huskers did it once may help them down the road.
“You never know what can happen,” he said. “It’s just exciting that we can do that, and now we know that’s in our arsenal and if we have to pull it out we’re going to have to go ahead and do that.”
Nebraska entered the fifth trailing by the same score it won by Tuesday at Haymarket Park, 4-3.
Creighton’s Nick Nordgren had hit a three-run homer off Erik Bird in the third to erase a 3-1 deficit. It’s the time it took the Huskers to go through the fifth, however, that cost the junior right-hander an opportunity to earn the victory.
After the inning, NU coaches decided to insert Michael Mariot, leaving Bird one inning shy of notching an easy win.
“You’ve gotta take care of guys’ arms, and when you’re down for that long you don’t know what can happen,” Sullivan said. “But that’s the most runs I think we’ve ever put up in an inning in any game I’ve ever been a part of.”
Timing may be everything. On Friday, Nebraska (30-7-1) begins a three-game series at Baylor. On Wednesday, the Bears whacked Texas State 25-13.
Reach Curt McKeever at 473-7441 or cmckeever@journalstar.com.
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