Sooners beat Notre Dame 6-2 to move within win of CWS finals
OMAHA, Neb. — Cade Horton struck out a career-high 11 in six innings, Tanner Tredaway continued his torrid postseason with three hits and Oklahoma took control of its bracket in the College World Series with a 6-2 victory over Notre Dame on Sunday night.
The Sooners (44-22) need one more win to advance to the best-of-three finals starting Saturday. They’ll play Wednesday against the winner of a Tuesday elimination game between Notre Dame (41-16) and Texas A&M. The Aggies beat Texas 10-2 on Sunday.
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With three freshmen, five sophomores and a senior in the everyday lineup and picked to finish sixth in the Big 12, Oklahoma wasn’t expected to be in this position. The Sooners got hot the second half of the regular season, won the conference tournament and went on the road to win its regional and super regional.
“Winning the national championship has always been the goal, and we’ve had that from the very beginning,” freshman third baseman Wallace Clark said. “It’s not a new idea. Even when we would lose a mid-week game, we would talk about it. The idea behind it was we’re going to win the whole damn thing.”
Horton, who had Tommy John surgery 16 months ago and didn’t pitch until March 29, went at least six innings for a third straight start. The redshirt freshman held the Irish scoreless on three singles the first five innings.
Horton (5-2) gave up David LaManna’s two-run homer to left in the sixth and didn’t come out for the seventh. He threw a season-high 100 pitches.
“When you have mid 90s, you have a good slider, you have a curveball, and he flashed a changeup periodically… That was a lot. Clearly we didn’t recognize it,” Irish coach Link Jarrett said.
Tredaway continued to be a catalyst for the Sooners. He’s now batting .513 (20 of 39) in the NCAA Tournament after going 3 for 4 and extending his hitting streak to 16 games. He drove in two runs and scored twice.
“I really like to keep things simple,” Tredaway said. “I get in patterns like this where I can go on a long stretch and do pretty well. I try not to get out of my zone. I think the two-strike approach has been really good for me the last couple weeks. I’m trying to hit good pitches and do my thing and be on time.”
Notre Dame starter Austin Temple walked three of the eight batters he faced and was pulled with one out in the second.
Reliever Aidan Tyrell (5-2) got out of the inning but encountered trouble in the third. Peyton Graham legged out an infield single, stole second and scored on Tredaway’s base hit. Tredaway took second on a passed ball and came home on Clark’s single.
The Sooners added three more runs in the sixth to go up 5-0. Two of those scored on Clark’s bunt on the safety squeeze. Tredaway came home from third, and Jimmy Crooks followed him in from first when Carter Putz picked up the ball and threw wildly to Jared Miller covering the bag.
Texas A&M ousts rival Longhorns from CWS with 10-2 victory
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Trevor Werner hit a tiebreaking single in a four-run second inning and No. 5 national seed Texas A&M broke a nine-game College World Series losing streak Sunday with a 10-2 victory over rival Texas, ending the Longhorns’ season.
The Aggies (43-19) spotted Texas (47-22) a two-run lead before taking control of the first CWS game between programs that had met 373 times since 1904.
Their first win in five Omaha appearances since 1993 moved Texas A&M to another elimination game Tuesday against Notre Dame. Oklahoma beat Notre Dame 6-2 on Sunday night.
Aggies starter Micah Dallas acknowledged there was added satisfaction to knocking out the Longhorns.
“There is a little extra oomph behind everything, especially when it’s Texas, because you just look at the fan bases, there’s a lot of like genuine hate between each other,” Dallas said. “We kind of feed off of it. We respect them. They’re a great ballclub. But there’s a little more, I don’t know, competition.”
Leading 8-2, the Aggies faced a stressful situation in the sixth inning when Jacob Palisch walked Mitchell Daly to load the bases with two outs and Ivan Melendez coming to bat. Palisch struck out the national home run leader and .393 hitter, catching him looking at a fastball at the knees on the inner half of the plate.
Palisch pumped his fist as he walked off the mound and Dallas (7-3), whom he replaced four batters earlier, let out a celebratory scream in the dugout and rushed to greet the left-hander.
“That was a massive part of the game,” Aggies coach Jim Schlossnagle said.
Dallas had two forgettable outings for Texas Tech in the 2019 CWS, and things didn’t start great for him Sunday as the Longhorns scored single runs in the first two innings. He held them scoreless the next three before Palisch came on after the first two batters in the sixth reached.
Texas starter Lucas Gordon (7-2) lasted just 1 2/3 innings for the shortest of his 16 career starts, and that was after a 10-pitch 1-2-3 first inning.
