Texas Tech baseball: A pair of comeback wins polish off perfect week

Over the weekend, the Texas Tech baseball team swept Rice thanks to two improbable comeback wins as part of a 5-0 week at home.

Sometimes perfect can look rather imperfect.  That was the case this week for the Texas Tech baseball team, which went a perfect 5-0 on the week but looked far from flawless in the process.

In fact, the No. 2 Red Raiders were nearly beaten twice by a Rice team that is now just 2-13 on the season after dropping three games at Rip Griffin Park.  Fortunately, Tim Tadlock’s team continued to display the same type of grit that it did a week prior while sweeping two games at No. 14 Florida State by showing the desire to fight back from large deficits against the Owls the way it did in both games against the Seminoles.

Friday’s series opener was the only drama-free game of the set for the home team.  In the 7-1 win, Clayton Beeter struck out 12 hitters and allowed only one run in six innings.

But the dominance of the Red Raider pitching staff would not last the weekend.  In fact, on both Saturday and Sunday, the Owls would do some serious damage at the plate scoring a combined 18 runs.

Saturday, Rice jumped out to a 7-0 lead in the third inning thanks to a five-run second.  But the Red Raiders were able to fight back to win a classic 19-12 Dan Law Field slugfest.

With five runs in both the fifth and six innings, four in the seventh, and three in the eighth, Tech stormed back for its 11th-straight win.  It was also Tim Tadlock’s 300th win with the Red Raiders and it has to go down as one of the more improbable given how large of a hole his team had to climb out of.

Sunday was no easier.  In a 7-6 walk-off victory that required eleven innings, the Red Raiders were down 6-2 as they went to the plate in the 8th inning.  Fortunately, the home team plated two runs in each of its final two regulation at-bats to send the game to extras.

In the 11th, redshirt freshman T.J. Rumfield was the hero with an RBI double that brought home Brian Klein to help prevent the game from ending in a tie.  Because of the travel plans of Rice, the two teams had agreed prior to the game that no inning would start after 3:15 pm in an arrangement that gave the game a bit of a Tuesday night Little League feel as fans and officials had to keep an eye on the clock.

Prior to the sweep of Rice, the Red Raiders took a pair of mid-week games against UNLV.  Outscoring the Rebels by a combined 22-5, Tech put up eleven runs in each game.

So let’s go inside this week of action to see how this team is developing ahead of a huge week that will see the Red Raiders take on Mississippi State for two games on the road before coming home to open conference play with three games against West Virginia.  Here are three takeaways from this week’s five wins.