EUGENE – Oregon hit back-to-back-to-back home runs in the bottom of the ninth inning to pull within one run but the rally was cut short on a sliding catch in the right-center field gap that gave UCLA an 8-7 win.
Trailing 8-2 entering the bottom of the ninth inning, freshman Jackson Jaha sparked the Ducks’ rally with a one-out pinch-hit double in his first career at-bat.
Tanner Smith made it 8-3 with an RBI single that scored Jaha before Rikuu Nishida struck out to put the Bruins (11-3, 1-1 Pac-12) one out away from evening the series at one game apiece after the Ducks on won the series opener on Friday night.
Oregon (10-4, 1-1 Pac-12) would not go quietly.
Sabin Ceballos crushed a ball to dead center field for a two-run home run cutting UCLA’s lead to three. Two pitches later, Drew Cowley made it a two-run game with a solo shot over the right-center wall. Jacob Walsh followed with another bomb over the right-center field wall.
“Well we lost 8-7 and so the bottom line is we lost at the end of the game," said Head Coach Mark Wasikowski. "The guys showed fight and came back and expect that as a team. They are really good and talented. That’s what's disappointing is we had some at-bats earlier in the game, we didn’t need a base hit or anything like that to score guys and if we came through a couple of those times we would have won the game there in the last inning. So it was a bit disappointing that we were not able to come through on some of those at-bats earlier in the game. That just required ball-in-play type thing, or sac fly. That was the overall difference in the game. Overall, we didn’t pitch well enough to win a baseball game and that was the story today.”
The rubber match is scheduled for Sunday at 12:05.
