Once again Ty Horn was up to the challenge for Nebraska baseball. The sophomore right-hander pitched 7 1/3 innings against Holy Cross Saturday in the NCAA Chapel Hill Regional, giving up five hits and one run, on a fifth-inning home run, in the Huskers’ 4-1 victory.
Nebraska will now play another elimination game against the loser of Saturday’s second game between top seed North Carolina and second-seeded Oklahoma at 11 a.m. CDT Sunday.
Now, back to “once again.” Horn pitched eight innings, allowing three hits and no runs, in Nebraska’s 5-0 victory against UCLA in the championship game of the Big Ten Tournament.
That sent the Huskers to Chapel Hill.
Given the situation, win or go home, Horn’s attitude was “just get us as far as I can in the game and put us in a good position to win, and trust the defense behind,” he said.
Of course, Horn got help, lots of it.
Luke Broderick replaced Horn after 109 pitches and earned his 13th save, getting out of a bases-loaded, one-out jam he created with a walk and a hit batter in the eighth. Broderick got the third batter he faced to ground into a double-play. In the ninth, he induced three ground-ball outs.
Nebraska’s defense didn’t commit and error and also wiped out a first-and-third, one-out threat in the top of the first inning by fooling and picking off the runner at third.
And the Husker offense responded to the Holy Cross home run in the fifth with a Devin Nunez double followed by a Cayden Brumbaugh home run in the bottom of the inning.
Nunez was 4-4, with two doubles and the run scored.
Hogan Helligso accounted for Nebraska’s other runs with a solo home run in the seventh and an RBI single with two outs in the eighth. Rhett Stokes had doubled before him.
Brumbaugh’s home run, his fifth of the season, was “giant,” said Coach Will Bolt, “because the momentum there started to swing the other way. They scored the run so the only goal there is just, ‘Let’s find a way to win this inning.’ I mean, what happened in the past, it doesn’t really matter, but we’ve been a very opportunistic offense that way, where we really respond to the challenge.
“That was a big swing by a guy that sits in the middle of the order for a reason, (Brumbaugh bats third) has driven a lot of big runs for us.”
The Huskers, now 33-28, will have more time to rest before Sunday’s game than they did Saturday’s.
“We’ve been backs-against-the-wall for a while now and our guys seem to play their best when we’re kind of in that scenario,” Bolt said. “So (the) good thing is that we’ve got a coaching staff as well that’s had experience in coming back through the loser’s bracket at a regional and winning it.
“So again, there’s just everything that goes into it. You just understand that you can’t look at the giant picture. You’ve just got to look at, ‘How can we be our best to start the game tomorrow, and how can we respond to things that come our way?’”
Horn, who struck out six, walked one and hit a batter, seemed to understand that and put the Huskers in position to stay alive Saturday.
