Brendan Bobo smacked a walk-off, two-run homer in the 10th inning to deliver Cal State Fullerton a 12-11 baseball victory over Hawaii at Goodwin Field in Orange County, Calif.
Before a Sunday matinee crowd of 1,463, the Titans rallied from deficits of 3-0, 9-5 and, in the ninth, 10-9.
The Titans cobbled a run on Nate Nankil’s sacrifice fly in the ninth to tie it at 10 and send the Big West game into extra innings.
In the 10th, the ’Bows went ahead 11-10 on third baseman Kyson Donahue’s home run to right field. But the ’Bows — and closer Connor Harrison — could not hold the advantage.
Moises Guzman opened the Fullerton 10th with a grounder up the middle that was just out of shortstop Jordan Donahue’s reach. Bobo then pulled left-hander Harrison’s pitch over the fence in right field for his fifth homer of the season.
“You’ve got to give them credit,” UH coach Rich Hill said of the Titans, who won for the seventh time in eight games. “They kept coming at us. We had our guy out there on the mound, and they found a way to get it done.”
After pitching the final three innings of UH’s 7-6 loss in Friday’s series opener, Harrison pitched three-plus innings on Sunday.
“They had seen him so much,” Hill said. Bobo “was kind of sitting on offspeed. When (Harrison is) that tired, the velocity is not really going to pick up. We thought he was our best option. He really wanted the ball when we took the lead on Kyson’s homer.”
For the second game in a row, the ’Bows amassed 19 hits. DallasJ Duarte, who caught all 28 innings this weekend, went 5-for-6. Ben Zeigler-Namoa hit his third homer of the season.
Zeigler-Namoa started for UH, but lasted only four batters, exiting with the bases loaded and one out in the first. Alex Giroux struck out the next two to end the threat.
But Giroux would leave two innings later after being charged with five runs. Tai Atkins, the third of six UH pitchers, induced a double play to escape a bases-loaded situation in the fourth. But Atkins eventually tired, giving up three runs. Trevor Ichimura pitched a scoreless sixth inning before giving way to Harrison.
The book-ended, walk-off victories enabled the Titans to win the series 2-1 and improve to 14-9 overall and 7-2 in the Big West. The ’Bows fell to 13-10 and 3-3. They play host to Cal State Bakersfield in a three-game series that begins on Thursday at Les Murakami Stadium.
“There’s a lot to be proud of,” Hill said. “That’s what I told the guys after the game. Super proud of the group the way they fought. It revealed a lot about the game of baseball and what we need to work on and some of the mistakes we’re making.”
The ’Bows return to Honolulu today. “We’ll go back to the drawing board on Tuesday,” Hill said.