Chris Kemp

The UW-Eau Claire men’s club baseball team polished off a best-of-three series win over UW-Whitewater with an 11-1 drubbing of UW-Barron County in eight innings Sunday afternoon at Carson Park.

The Blugolds broke the gates open early with a four-run second inning, highlighted by a two-run triple by sophomore Pete Storm.

“Our bats came alive after being dead the last few weekends,” senior outfielder Larry David said. “Getting run support really … sets the tone for the rest of the game.”

Freshman Drew Rollins pitched four innings and allowed only one run on three hits, getting out of the only jam the Blugolds faced all day in the fifth.

In that inning, Rollins walked the bases loaded but got out of it with only one run thanks to a base-running error by Barron County and a running grab by centerfielder freshman Josh Ledzian to end the threat.

The Blugolds then scored three more times in the sixth inning, with Barron County committing two costly errors that led to all three of those runs.

Eau Claire, which is divided into an A and a B team, used a mixture of players from both squads against Barron County since it was a non-league game.

“Today we wanted to try to get the whole team involved,” coach Kyle Buchmann said. “It was a good chance to have guys who play a lot on the A team and the guys who play a lot on the B team together in the same dugout.”

Friday, the Blugolds defeated Whitewater 12-5 in the rain and split with the Warhawks Saturday.

The Blugolds dropped the first game of the doubleheader 15-5 but came back and won the second 10-0. Both contests were called for the 10-run rule when the deficit crawled to double figures after the fifth inning.

The Warhawks got the better of a battle of pitching aces in the first game, roughing up senior Greg Aune.

“We didn’t hit the ball as well as we needed to,” Buchmann said. “They really hit Greg hard. Greg didn’t have his best outing.”

But the Blugolds, needing to take two of three to stay alive in the playoff hunt, would come back in the second game and turn the tables on the Warhawks in the shutout.

“Basically we started having a little more fun,” sophomore designated hitter Jess Bauer said. “A lot of pressure got off us this weekend, and that’s when we started playing a little better.”

Buchmann agreed, saying the Blugolds did a good job of bouncing back from a blowout loss.

“It really showed a lot of character on our part to not give up after that first game and really stick it to them and do what we needed to do,” Buchmann said.

Eau Claire now finds itself in third place after the Whitewater series as the Warhawks head to UW-Madison to take on the Badgers for five games.

Buchmann said if either the Warhawks or Badgers lose two or three of those games and the Blugolds sweep their weekend series against Marquette, Eau Claire will claim their second consecutive conference title and advance to the playoffs.

“We need to win three,” Buchmann said. “So we need as many people out here to cheer us on and support us as we can.”