Heading into Houston this weekend, if you told head coach Mark Marquess and Stanford’s baseball team that they’d split a four-game series against a consensus top-15 in Rice, they probably would have been happy with it. After all, that was the blueprint for the Cardinal’s postseason berth last season — getting through their tough pre-conference schedule and emerging with a big boost in RPI, one of the key considerations for the selection committee.
“I thought we had three really good games,” Marquess said. “We didn’t give them much competition today. They hammered us pretty good. But the first three games were really good and we won two close games.”
Stanford (6-6), which kicked off a stretch of nine games in ten days with the four-game series, won the first and third games of the series with dominating pitching performances from their starters. But the Cardinal couldn’t keep up with Rice (8-5) in the other two games, in which the pitching staff got into an early hole that the offense couldn’t dig its way out of.
In the opener, a 5-3 Stanford victory, sophomore ace Cal Quantrill pitched seven strong innings and got plenty of run support from the young bats of the lineup to earn his second win of the season. Although a sharp Rice offense tagged him for three runs, he settled down late in the ballgame and only allowed two hits in his last four innings of work to propel the Cardinal to a big opening win over a top-10 opponent.
And in game three, fellow sophomore Brett Hanewich also twirled a gem, only allowing three hits and an unearned run in his final inning of work to push the Cardinal to their series split with a 3-1 win. He was locating his pitches low in the zone all evening, with 14 of his 21 outs coming on the ground. That stellar outing dropped his ERA to a team-best 1.35.
“I was able to locate my fastball for the most part and later in the game,” Hanewich said. “Probably around the third, I figured out more of my off-speed pitches and locating them is the key to success at any level.”
“We came out well and played some good defense for the most part,” Edman added. “Awesome job by Brett Hanewich pumping strikes and attacking their hitters and giving us seven strong. That’s huge for a four-game series to really save some pitching and Logan James did a good job of coming in and shutting the door.”
The two Cardinal hitters to do especially well this weekend were sophomore shortstop Tommy Edman and freshman first baseman Matt Winaker, who notched six and seven hits over the series, with Winaker continuing a particularly hot start to the season and keeping his season batting average at a torrid .405 clip.
“I was just seeing the ball really well today,” Edman said after getting five hits during Saturday’s doubleheader. “I made a couple adjustments this morning during batting practice and it turned out to be really good.”
Edman, who has started at shortstop over the last six games in place of the injured junior Drew Jackson, has coincidentally picked it up after returning to the position at which he started a majority of his games last season — at the time, also in place of Jackson. Over this limited six-game sample, the sophomore has hit .313/.371/.375, compared to a .263/.286/.368 slash line over his first five games of the season.
In the Cardinal’s losses, junior Marc Brakeman and sophomore Chris Viall combined for nine earned runs allowed in just 7.1 innings of work, which never really gave the Cardinal a chance to come back, especially with Rice’s Sunday starter, Austin Orewiler, dealing 7.2 innings of one-run ball on the other side in the series finale.
Stanford will continue its difficult stretch with a non-conference road game against San Jose State on Tuesday evening before welcoming Texas to Sunken Diamond for a four-game set over the weekend.
Contact Do-Hyoung Park at dpark027 ‘at’ stanford.edu or Jordan Wallach at jwallach ‘at’ stanford.edu.