Junior starting pitcher Dillon Tate extended his scoreless streak to 15 full innings and junior first baseman Dalton Kelly drove in a career-high five runs to lead No. 16 UC Santa Barbara to an 11-0 series-clinching throttling of Kentucky on Saturday afternoon.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Due to forecasted rain tomorrow, the start time for Sunday’s series finale has been pushed up one hour to 12:00 p.m.
The second spectacular start in a row for Tate since being moved to the rotation from the closer’s role, he allowed no runs, four hits, two walks, and struck out nine in seven full innings.
After his shutout performance last week, the Claremont, Calif. native has now gone 15.0 straight innings without allowing a run, the third separate time he has accrued such a streak in his career.
Continuing a dominant stretch for head coach Andrew Checketts’s rotation, the Gauchos’ starting pitchers have now allowed one earned run or less in six straight games, a program record.
The Gauchos are now 6-0 out of the gate, and dating back to last season have the longest active winning streak in the NCAA at nine games. This is now the longest winning streak to open a season for UCSB since the Al Ferrer-led Gauchos won 11 straight in 1984.
Dalton Kelly was at the center of UCSB’s 11-run effort, recording a double and triple as part of his five-RBI day.
He opened the scoring in the third by slicing a two-run double down the left field line. He came around to score himself on an odd play – he attemped to steal third and UK catcher Greg Fettes’s on-the-money throw ricocheted off the third baseman’s glove and then Kelly before rolling into the UCSB dugout.
Four runs then scored on Kelly’s seventh-inning triple, as his bases-clearing shot into the right-center field gap was sweetened with a throwing error from the UK second baseman that allowed Kelly to score. The hit also broke open the game at 7-0 and allowed Checketts to remove Tate comfortably as the still-adjusting pitcher was nearing 100 pitches.
Though Tate and the UCSB bullpen kept the Wildcats off the board for the entire contest, it wasn’t for lack of opportunity that UK got shut out.
Tate allowed just four hits, but all of them went for extra bases, including three leadoff doubles.
That didn’t deter UCSB’s starter though, as his stuff seemed to be even better when pitching out of the stretch on Saturday. Tate put a chokehold on Kentucky’s bats once they were able to get a runner on, as the Wildcats went 0-10 with runners on base and 0-8 with runners in scoring position against UCSB’s flamethrower. Of his nine strikeouts, seven came with runners in scoring position.
Tate used his slider to escape two-on, one out situations in both the first and fourth innings.
In the top of the first, he got three straight swinging strikes off his slider from UK No. 3 hitter Thomas Bernal, then Tate made cleanup hitter Ka’ai Tom chase a slider off the plate for an inning-ending punchout.
In the fourth, he did almost the exact same thing, fanning Marcus Carson and Connor Heady with sliders to get out of a jam.
UCSB catcher Campbell Wear was pivotal in stopping Wildcat rallies in the fifth and sixth innings. In the former, he gunned down UK center fielder Kyle Barrett trying to steal third after reaching on a leadoff double. The Wildcats’ JaVon Shelby tripled with two out and nobody on in the sixth, but then tried to advance home despite Wear making a perfectly executed block of a hard slider during the next at-bat, with Tate easily scooping up the ball and retiring Shelby at the plate.
Tate ended his day with a concise 1-2-3 seventh inning, getting Heady to swing over a slider for the inning-ending “K.”
Though Tate’s exploits on the mound jumped out, as the game was still relatively close after six innings, the UCSB offense got their just desserts in the end, putting in good at-bats against UK starter Zack Brown – who took the loss after allowing three earned runs in 4.2 innings – before finally breaking through against the Wildcats bullpen.
Besides Kelly’s big hits, senior third baseman Peter Maris drove in two runs, first on a fifth-inning base hit up the middle and then on an eighth inning RBI groundout.
Senior left fielder Cameron Newell also had a two-run single in the eighth as part of a 2-3, three-run day.
Junior DH Robby Nesovic had three base hits in as many at-bats, and Luke Swenson had another nice day at the plate, driving a double down the right field line for a double and depositing an offspeed pitch down the left field line for a long single.
Junior lefty Justin Jacome (1-0, 1.35) is scheduled to start on the mound for UCSB tomorrow. He will be opposed by sophomore LHP Logan Salow, who has tossed one scoreless inning so far in 2015.
