The Arizona State Sun Devils took a one-game lead over the Texas Longhorns in College Baseball Super Regionals. The winner of the best of three series advances to the College World Series in Omaha. The Sun Devils got a great outing from starter Brady Rodgers and took advantage of two Texas errors to push across a couple of early runs.
"First of all, I just want to thank the defense," Rodger said. "The defense was unreal. [Third baseman] Riccio [Torrez] made some good plays, [shortstop] Deven [Marrero] made some good plays. It kept the leadoff runners off and kept them from starting their offense and doing what they like to do - getting the leadoff runner and getting him over. I think that is what the whole team did well as a whole is just keeping the leadoff runner off the bases."
#10 Baseball Takes Game One of Super Regional; Beats Texas 3-1 - ARIZONA STATE OFFICIAL ATHLETIC SITE
ASU got on the board first with two unearned runs in the third. With one out, Andrew Aplin hit a sharp ground ball that resulted in an error by Longhorn first baseman Tant Shepherd. After Johnny Ruettiger walked, Deven Marrero came up and hit a ground ball back to Jungmann. It looked to be a potential inning-ending double play, but miscommunication by the Texas infielders led to the second error of the inning and Aplin came around to score. Two batters later, DeMichele hit a bloop double to left to score Ruettiger and make it 2-0.
Sophomore DH Joey DeMichele continued his great postseason play with two RBI in the game.
The two teams play again Saturday at 4:00 p.m. Arizona time with ESPN broadcasting the action on TV.