Offense came quick for the Cougs, as they had three runs across home plate by the end of the first frame. All said and done, putting a 12-spot on Seattle U secured the victory for a team slightly losing its footing in the middle of the 2024 campaign.
WSU baseball (11-8, 2-4 Pac-12) beat Seattle U (6-13, 2-4 WAC) 12-5 after scoring three-plus runs in three separate innings. Casen Taggart went 2-for-3 with two walks and two long balls, his fourth and fifth home runs of the 2024 season.
While no one joined him in the home run party, Max Hartman, Kyle Russell and Crew Parke all had extra-base hits in the winning effort.
Hartman got the game going with a leadoff double in the bottom of the first. Quickly, Russell hit his first of two doubles to drive in Hartman and replace him at second base. With a one-run lead, Taggart hit his first home run of the night, praising the two guys ahead of him postgame for always getting on base.
“It’s fun. They’re always on base when I’m coming up, so it’s nice,” Taggart said.
After his two-hit day, Taggart is now a four-game hitting streak wherein he had multi-hit days in three of those outings. Prior to the UCLA series, he had hit .294 on the season, now he is sitting at .338.
While his two-run home run gave the Cougs their 3-0 lead in just the first inning, the offense had a stretch where they failed to get things really going. In innings two through five, they failed to put another run across and had just five hits, never finding success with runners on.
Luckily for the offense, redshirt senior Rylan Haider diced up the Seattle U offense in his first career start. Coming in with three appearances and having thrown no more than 19 pitches in an outing in 2024, he threw 71 pitches over 4.0 innings of shutout baseball.
“He was dialed. He brought the energy. He just put it in the strike zone, that’s all we ask,” Taggart said.
Despite giving up six hits and walking a batter, he controlled the base paths and kept a lock on his opposition. In the bottom of the third, he gave up back-to-back one-out singles. Cool under pressure, his very next pitch he induced a ground ball that turned into a double-play to end the inning.
In his final inning of work, he once again gave up back-to-back singles, this time with two outs. On a 3-2 pitch, he got his out and finished his day of work with a successful outing.
Offensively, the Cougs got things going again in the bottom of the sixth. Hartman drove in the inning’s first run on a fielder’s choice. Russell doubled for the second time of the game, driving in his second run in the process and finally, mirroring the first frame, Taggart hit a two-run home run to score himself and Russell.
While in the top of seventh the Cougs gave all four runs they had just scored back, the offense did not falter.
A hit-by-pitch gave WSU its first base runner in the bottom of the seventh. From there, back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back singles kept the wagon rolling. Once the dust settled, the four runs ping-ponged again to make the WSU lead a healthy 11-4.
Each team mirrored the other the next inning as well, scoring one run apiece to bring the score to 12-5, where it rested in a clean top of the ninth inning, securing win No. 11 for head coach Nathan Choate in his first season.
WSU is back in action during their homestand right away. At 2:05 p.m., they take on Seattle U again at Bailey-Brayton field to close out the quick two-game set.
