Penn State catcher Matt Harter’s two-out, two-strike, two-run home run in the bottom of the seventh inning led to a painful end in the second game of Saturday’s doubleheader. Northwestern had been ahead 4-3 until Harter’s walk-off shot.
The loss was even more emotional because it followed a closely-contested, 11-inning loss earlier in the day.
Saturday’s first game went into four extra innings, and NU led in the seventh, ninth and 11th innings.
The Nittany Lions (16-11, 5-3 Big Ten) scored two runs in the bottom of the 11th to end the three-plus-hour game and win 6-5. The weekend series ended with the Wildcats (13-14-1, 3-5) losing three of four games at Beaver Field in State College, Pa.
The Cats took the first game of the series after pounding out 15 hits and three home runs Friday. Shortstop Jon Mikrut had three hits, including a home run in the eighth inning. Mikrut also pitched two scoreless innings to get the save in the first game.
But things went bad on Saturday for the Cats.
“Saturday was disappointing,” coach Paul Stevens said. “It was a tough day to swallow. There were two ball games that seemed to slip away from us.
“It was that kind of nip-and-tuck scene where, unfortunately, we caught some of the worst luck that we’ve seen for a while.”
Stevens said NU’s weakness was on the mound. Although starting pitchers Dan Brauer and George Kontos threw decently in Saturday’s double-headers, he said, Penn State scored by taking advantage of pitching mistakes.
Stevens said his hurlers were “not hitting their spots as consistently as they should, for the same reasons hitters don’t find ways to put the ball in play — half an inch here, half an inch there. In baseball, that’s a whole lot.”
But in Sunday’s defeat, the coach said, lackluster hitting plagued the team. He said the Cats lost momentum when they failed to deliver at critical moments, such as when two consecutive batters struck out with the bases loaded, ending the first inning with three men on base and no runs on the board.
“We couldn’t shut them down in the bottom half of the innings,” Stevens said.
Josh Lieberman was one hitter who had an “ungodly weekend,” Stevens said. Lieberman went 3 for 3 in Sunday’s game and had NU’s only RBI. He went 6 for 9 overall in two games on Saturday and had two RBI.
Lieberman said he tried to hit more line drives and ground balls after getting no hits in Friday’s game, and tried to be more patient in waiting for strikes.
Sunday’s hitting wasn’t too solid, Stevens said, but he was pleased with the performance by starting pitcher Julio Siberio. In his first Big Ten start, Siberio gave up three runs in four and one-third innings and struck out six batters.
“They got hits when I fell behind in the count, and I had to come clean with fastballs,” Siberio said. “When I got ahead in the count, I could confuse them a little bit.”
Siberio said he is an off-speed pitcher; he prefers to keep batters off balance by throwing curveballs and change-ups instead of fastballs.
It was disappointing to lose the close contests, Siberio said, but “we’re in every single one of the games we’re playing. It’s really, really important that every game, even when you are down, you have the possibility to come back.
“Playing these close games gives us a lot of experience, knowing that every out is incredibly important and that every base runner is incredibly important.”
