Texas-Missouri (Courtesy of Donald J. Boyles)
I had the chance to attend the Texas-Missouri doubleheader on March 15. The doubleheaders featured two of the best pitchers in the nation with Missouri’s Kyle Gibson and Texas’ Chance Ruffin toeing the rubber for their respective teams. From the get go, you could tell that both pitchers were on fire even though it was only a chilly 46 degrees in Austin. You would have thought we were in Columbia, Missouri but we were in Austin, Texas. He had the Texas hitters confused throughout the game as he pitched a complete game shutout as the Tigers won 2-0.
This is what Texas Head Coach Augie Garrido had to say about Kyle Gibson;
I think that their pitcher was absolutely brilliant. He had a 94-mile an hour fastball that he was locating. He threw three pitches for strikes, and he threw them in any count. When you can do that, you’re pretty good. You take his pitching and the way they played defense – they’re shortstop’s really good, the second baseman made a couple great plays – they got themselves a shutout.
The Tiger batters were able to get to Ruffin in the 3rd when the Tigers were able to record 4 straight singles to score only two runs of the game. The rest of the game Ruffin was able to keep the Tigers off the board but the real story was Gibson. Every time that Texas mounted a rally Gibson would be able to go to his bag of tricks to finish off the inning.
Pictures from Game one:
Game two featured a pitching matchup between Brandon Workman of Texas and Ian Berger of Missouri. In the bottom of the first, Texas was able to do something that it was not able to to do in game one, that was to get the lead off batter on. Travis Tucker was able to do just that as he laced a pitched right down the left field line for a double. Tucker was moved to 3rd on a sac bunt by Michael Torres and scored on Brandon Belt ground ball to 2nd base as Texas took a 1-0 lead in game 2. A lead that they would not relinquish as they went on to win the second game 5-0 behind Workman’s seven shutout innings of work where he only allowed 2 hits and picked up seven strikeouts.
On his performance today: I came out throwing well. I had good velocity. I was locating well. My location stayed pretty good the whole game. I walked two guys. But I got it right back and had really good control of my pitches today, and that let me keep guys off balance and stay ahead in the count.
Game three tomorrow at 1 pm at UFCU Disch Falk Field.
Pictures from Game Two
