Team moves to 10-10 record after Tuesday's loss to the University of Washington
By Nic LaPonte
The Pilots are in the middle of a long series of 14 home games, most recently against the Utah Utes last Friday and the Washington Huskies on Tuesday.
The first game of the series against the Utes was won by Portland with a score of 8-0 and a personal record pitching performance by junior Given Kutz. Kutz pitched a shutout game, a rare occurrence. He also struck out a record 14 Utah players and walked none while surrendering only nine hits through the entire game.
This is Kutz's second complete game of the season; he also played the entirety of the 5-2 win over UC-Davis last week. Kutz has a record of 3-2 this season and was awarded West Coast Conference Pitcher of the Week honors for this week as well. Kutz leads the Pilots this season in innings pitched (40.2), wins, and in strikeouts (35).
This is only the third time in UP history that 14 players were struck out by a single pitcher. The last time the feat was accomplished was in 1990 by Aaron Frederickson in a win over Eastern Oregon. The all-time high record of 16 strikeouts is held by Jim Golden from 1967 and by Tom Hannibal from 1970.
This shutout is also the first made by Portland since the March 2004 victory over Dallas Baptist and the first against a Division I opponent since an April 1999 game against USF.
Despite the success of the first game, the Utes won both Saturday's game (7-5) and Sunday's game (8-3), which brought the Portland record to 10-10 on the season, with the 14-5 loss to Washington on Tuesday,
There were a number of factors which contributed to the Pilot loss against the Huskies, but Head Coach Chris Sperry named the major ones.
"Two things, inability to get a hit when we needed it, and a sub-par performance out of the bullpen," Sperry said.
Despite the early rains on that day, the Pilots played against the Huskies in a non-conference game. Despite their early lead, Portland lost in the later innings at the hands of heavy-hitting Washington.
The game began with the Pilots trailing by one by the end of the first inning. The teams traded hits with back and forth single runs in the next two innings. The Pilots took the lead in the fourth with a ground-out single by freshman Rock Gale, which allowed sophomore Chase Powell to score a third run at the bottom of the inning.
The Huskies took the lead in the top of the fifth however, and held it by knocking out a total of six runs that inning, with three more to come in the sixth inning and three more after that in the seventh. The fifth inning runs were all scored with two outs already on the board for Washington; the opening salvo was started by Washington player Curt Rindal, who made a two- run homer off of Portland reliever Pat Geraghty. Geraghty surrendered two more runs after that before he was relieved and later saddled with the loss.
Portland was scoreless until the eighth, when a home-run by junior Danny Meier and a single allowed the Pilots to tack two more up onto the scoreboard.
"The disappointing thing isn't losing, but playing poorly. It's something we're trying to change, to get back to playing good baseball like we're used to doing," Sperry said.
The next series will be a three-game set against the Dallas Baptist Patriots, beginning with a game at 3 p.m. today.
