Baseball team beats OSU and UTSA, takes two from Oral Roberts
They have since taken two of three games from visiting Oral Roberts University and one from the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Rice centerfielder Jose Cruz, Jr. who totalled four home runs in as many games, led the offensive assault.
A grand slam against Oklahoma State paved the way for a 10-3 Rice victory and another homer sparked a six-run first inning, and a 6-4 win, for the Owls in their second game against the Golden Eagles of Oral Roberts.
His two homeruns against Oral Roberts in the first game kept the Golden Eagles from running away with an easy victory.
"The entire team has been hitting well the last two weeks," said Cruz.
Thursday's game versus UTSA (19-4) was to have been played in San Antonio but, due to rain, was played at Cameron Field.
UTSA opened with a flurry, but the Owls escaped the top of the first inning trailing by only one run. Rice answered with two runs of its own in the second, two more in the third and three in the fourth.
Mike Wilson picked up his third win of the season in a 7-1 victory.
On March 12, Rice played host to the Golden Eagles in a doubleheader. The Rice pitching tandem of Chad Feris and Tim Byrdak combined to stymy the Oral Roberts offensive assault, as the Owls held on for a 6-4 victory.
Feris got his fifth win of the season in as many games and Byrdak got the save.
Game two was a back-and-forth battle, with each team matching the other. However, in the bottom of the eighth, Rice broke a 3-3 tie to go ahead 4-3. With Byrdak, as the starter, on the mound, the Golden Eagles could muster no offense in the final inning as the Owls swept the doubleheader by winning the second game, 4-3.
In what seemed an ominous beginning for Rice in this three-game series versus Oral Roberts, the Golden Eagles took to Cameron Field on March 11 and held off the battling Owls for a 10-9 victory in ten innings of the first game.
The Golden Eagles took off early at a feverish pace, jumping all over Owls starter Wilson for two runs in the first inning.
However, Rice immediately answered back as the bat of Cruz did the talking with a three-run homer.
Going into the bottom of the ninth inning, as the Golden Eagles found themselves sitting atop the scoreboard with a seemingly insurmountable 3-run cushion.
However, the hot bat of Cruz came through again for the Owls, as he popped yet another three-run homer to extend the game into extra innings.
Unfortunately for the Owls, they were one comeback short. Oral Roberts took advantage of an unearned run in the top of the tenth inning and took the first game by a score of 10-9.
March 10 represented a day of revenge for the Owls as they challenged the 17th-ranked Cowboys of Oklahoma State in true grudge match following their disappointing loss to the same team one day before.
It looked like it would be a close game early, as the Owls could manage no more than a one-run lead through four innings.
The Owls added two in the bottom of the fourth and one more in the bottom of the fifth inning.
A sixth-inning grand-slam homer for Cruz put the finishing touches on a five-run inning and seven-run victory, as Rice punished the Cowboys by a score of 10-3.
Pitcher Bo Johnson hurled eight innings of one-run baseball to earn the win.
"It is great anytime you can beat a powerhouse like Oklahoma State," said Johnson. "It just goes to show that if we play our best, we can beat any team in the country."
The Owls have extended their season record to 17-8 as the conference season looms. Rice will take on the University of Houston today to open up Southwest Conference play.
"We are capable of making a major impact in the league this year," said Johnson.
"Still, our pitching needs to get better and we have to fight harder at the plate. We can't keep giving games away with poor defense."
This item appeared in the Sports section of the March 18, 1994 issue.
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