Cal Poly baseball opens season with four-game sweep of Pacific
Cal Poly couldn’t have asked for a better start to the 2016 college baseball season.
The new-look Mustangs completed a convincing four-game sweep of Pacific with a 19-2 victory on a picturesque Sunday afternoon inside Baggett Stadium.
Sophomore right-hander Erich Uelmen capped an encouraging opening weekend for the Cal Poly pitching staff. The hard-throwing Uelmen scattered three hits over six innings while striking six against one walk.
The Mustangs (4-0) staked Uelmen to an early 6-0 lead with a five-run third inning and pushed across eight more in the fifth. That marked the fourth straight game Cal Poly scored at least six runs to begin the year.
By comparison, Cal Poly started 1-6 a year ago and didn’t reach the four-win threshold until the second week of March.
“I had a little jitters going into that first inning,” said the 6-foot-3, 180-pound Uelmen. “It was good to just finally go out there. I was really just focused all week to get through that first inning, because after that you get used to it and can roll from there.”
Head coach Larry Lee made it clear he felt the Mustangs’ pitching staff would be the team’s biggest question mark early in the season, and perhaps some of those concerns were elevated over the weekend.
Sophomore left-hander Kyle Smith set an impressive tone with a complete-game victory in the season opener. Junior Slater Lee turned in a sharp performance in the second game of Saturday’s doubleheader.
In between those contests, Cal Poly used four pitchers in a 7-6 extra-inning win. That game was decided in the 10th inning when true freshman catcher Nick Meyer roped a walk-off single through the right side for the first hit of his collegiate career.
“You don’t quite know what you have until you start playing real games,” said Lee, now in his 14th season at Cal Poly. “… But we saw a number of things that were encouraging, especially from a pitching standpoint.”
Offensively, five Mustangs recorded multiple hits in the lopsided series finale. Fourth-year junior Brett Barbier went 3-for-4 with two doubles and two RBIs, capping a strong first weekend at the plate.
Speedy sophomore Josh George also had three hits on Sunday, his third multi-hit game of the series.
The Mustangs started five true freshmen at different points in the series, none more impressive than centerfielder Alex McKenna. A native of Canyon Country, McKenna hit .500 for the series with two home runs, five RBIs and he scored nine times.
His two-run home run in the third inning Sunday helped chase Pacific starting pitcher Bryce Lombardi before he could record one out in the frame. Lombardi gave up singles to George and Jake Mavropoulos before walking Barbier to load the bases.
Right fielder John Schuknecht, Cal Poly’s only senior starter, drove a bases-clearing double off the wall in centerfield to put the Mustangs ahead 6-0.
“They like to fight,” Barbier said of the freshmen class. “They’re not afraid of any opponent and they’re ready to play, so that was a real relief to see out of the young guys.”
Cal Poly resumes its 12-game home stand at 6 p.m. Friday when the Mustangs host defending Pac-12 champion UCLA. The Bruins return 24 players from last year’s team that won a program-record 22 conference games and earned the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament.
The Mustangs will then play a doubleheader on Saturday against Michigan (noon) and UCLA (6 p.m.). They close out the weekend with a 1 p.m. matchup against the Bruins.
“That’s who you want to play against, that type caliber of a program,” Lee said. “It’ll answer some more questions about, how are we going to respond to a quality opponent like that?”
This story was originally published February 21, 2016 at 5:19 PM with the headline "Cal Poly baseball opens season with four-game sweep of Pacific."