Ben Brecht leads UC Santa Barbara baseball over the University of Hawaii

Ben Brecht pitched a four-hitter over six innings to lead sixth-ranked UC Santa Barbara to an 8-2 baseball victory over Hawaii tonight at Les Murakami Stadium.

A crowd of 1,982 saw the Gauchos win their 11th in a row and continue their dominance of the Big West. They are 42-7 overall and atop the league at 16-3. The Rainbow Warriors fell to 20-25 and 8-11.

“They were better than us,” UH coach Mike Trapasso said. “We were outplayed in every phase.”

Brecht exited just before the start of the seventh inning with an apparent injury. His departure was preceded by a visit to the mound by UCSB coach Andrew Checketts and a trainer. Before that, Brecht was an inning-turning mystery the ’Bows could not solve.

Brecht allowed four hits and did not issue a walk. He had only one three-ball count and threw strikes on 71.3 percent of his pitches, including first-pitch strikes to 16 of 23 batters. He struck out seven, including Dallas Duarte, who had fanned 11 times in 139 previous at-bats.

“Brecht pitches really well up in the zone,” Trapasso said. “He’s a high-spin-rate guy. We coudn’t hit the ball up in the zone, and we couldn’t lay off it. It was a bad recipe.”

The Gauchos scored three runs in the fourth to break a 1-all tie. They finished with a four-run ninth, punctuated by Andrew Martinez’s three-run blast to center. It was the Gauchos’ 64th homer of the season. They are 35-1 in games in which they have homered.