| Baseball |
|---|
| UCLA — 5 |
| Iowa — 2 |
On Friday afternoon at Duane Banks Field in Iowa, the UCLA Bruins baseball team (23-2, 10-0 Big Ten) defeated the Iowa Hawkeyes (15-9, 3-4 Big Ten) by a score of 5-2. The offensive and defensive performances from the Bruins today were dominant — the Bruins slugged two home runs, and junior right-handed starting pitcher Logan Reddemann had a stellar outing.
Reddemann has continued to demonstrate his excellence at the collegiate level, slicing through a dominant Iowa lineup with a final statline of 6.1 innings pitched, one earned run and nine strikeouts. Although he did allow five hits, Reddemann was able to effectively limit the damage. One of those hits came at the bottom of the seventh inning, where he stranded Iowa’s Kooper Schulte on base, and became his only earned run of the night.
Despite this, Reddemann had a stellar outing, and gave the Bruins a fighting chance throughout the game.
The scoring action did not start until the third inning. But once again, it was the Bruins who struck first in this game.
With junior shortstop Roch Cholowsky on first base, junior first baseman Mulivai Levu crushed a 412-foot two-run home run on the second pitch of his at-bat to drive in Cholowsky, making it a 2-0 ballgame. This was Levu’s seventh home run of the season.
But the Bruins were not finished adding runs — they capitalized on this during the top of the fourth inning.
In perhaps what was the highlight of the entire game, redshirt junior right fielder Payton Brennan hit an absolutely astonishing 514-foot home run to deep right field (yes, you read that number correctly) on the first pitch that he saw. Iowa pitcher Jaron Bleeker served Brennan a pitch right down the middle, and Brennan took advantage of the mislocated pitch to take him deep.
The Bruins would add on with an RBI single on a 2-2 count by junior second baseman Phoenix Call to drive in junior center fielder Will Gasparino, followed by an RBI groundout by junior left fielder Dean West, who was able to drive in junior catcher Cashel Dugger to make it a 5-0 ballgame.
Although the Bruins did not score for the rest of the game and the Hawkeyes were able to score on two runs, dominant performances by the Bruins’ pitching staff were able to limit the damage to just that — two runs.
After starting the series off with a win, the Bruins look to continue winning as they continue the weekend series with Iowa Saturday, March 28 at 11 a.m. PST.
