conference title
The Waves defeated Loyola Marymount University, 18-8, Sunday to win the West Coast Conference Championship and earn an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. Pepperdine will begin tournament play in Long Beach against USC.
By Kevin Connelly/Special to The Malibu Times
After losing to Loyola Marymount on Friday, Pepperdine University baseball struck back with victories on Saturday and Sunday to win the best-of-three West Coast Conference championship series at LMU’s George C. Page Stadium. The Waves pounded LMU in the decisive game, 18-8.
Game three did not become a Pepperdine trouncing until the later innings. The Waves took the early lead in the first inning when WCC Player of the Year Chad Tracy hit a three-run home run to left-center field. LMU (31-27) rebounded in its half of the first to take a 5-3 lead on an A.J. LaMonda grand slam to right field off of Pepperdine starting pitcher Barry Enright
Enright-the WCC Freshman of the Year with a 4.33 regular season ERA-gave up six runs (five earned) on five hits and two walks in three innings. By the time Enright left the game in the third inning, LMU was leading 6-5 with the support of its raucous home crowd.
Pepperdine (38-21) took an 11-7 lead by the seventh inning, but Loyola threatened in the bottom of the seventh by loading the bases with no outs, thus bringing the tying run to the plate. Pepperdine head coach Steve Rodriquez then made a daring decision to bring in Steve Kleen, the team’s closer, to quell the LMU rally. Kleen, used primarily in one-inning situations, held Loyola to one run in the inning to maintain a comfortable 11-8 lead.
Kleen pitched the final two innings to close out the game for Pepperdine, which went on a hitting barrage to score a total of seven runs in the eighth and ninth innings. “With the amount of runs scored today, I kind of knew I would be coming in early,” said Kleen, also the starting first baseman. “It wasn’t a surprise.”
Kleen surprised Loyola batters in locating fastballs on the corners of the plate throughout the late innings to lower his ERA to 1.97.
The most effective hitter for the Waves in the series was left fielder and Westlake Village native Luke Salas, who batted nine for 14 (.643) in the three games with six runs scored and two RBIs. “That’s just baseball,” Salas said. “Balls were finding holes for me this weekend. To [celebrate] on the field like we did at a rival’s house [George C. Page Stadium] is really special. We believed we were the best team in the WCC all year. Now there’s now doubt.”
By his own standards, Tracy, who is the son of Dodgers manager Jim Tracy, had struggled to make much of a mark in the first two games of the series, going 2 for 7 with one RBI in those contests. But Tracy was the victim of bad luck in many of those at-bats as he had hit balls hard right to LMU gloves. “You just have to try to keep hitting the ball hard,” Tracy explained. “You can’t control [outs like] that. Eventually the ball will start to fall in there for you.”
“We have the offensive team to [score a lot of runs],” Tracy continued. “You don’t come to the ballpark expecting to score 18 runs in a championship game, but we’ll definitely take it.”
Tracy made up for his subpar performance in the first two games with a game three performance that included three hits, five RBIs and three runs scored.
Pepperdine begins NCAA Regional play on June 3 against cross-town rival USC in Long Beach. The ultimate destination for the Waves is the Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha, Neb., where they will play in the College World Series Championship Series starting June 25 if they can find a way to successfully traverse the field of 64.