OSU Baseball: Three Thoughts on the Cowboys Series Sweep against No. 22 Kansas State

GAME 1 BOX SCORE
GAME 2 BOX SCORE
GAME 3 BOX SCORE

STILLWATER — The top team in the Big 12 standings played the bottom team in the Big 12 standings this weekend, and just as everyone expected, the bottom team won via sweep.

Oklahoma State closed out its series sweep against No. 22 Kansas State with two wins on Sunday. The Cowboys won Game 1 of the doubleheader 7-0 before taking Game 2 10-2. OSU beat K-State 4-3 on Friday.

The three wins from the weekend push the Pokes back above .500 at 15-14 this season, and OSU improves to 4-6 in Big 12 play.

Here are three thoughts on the weekend.

1. A Few Awesome Pitching Performances

Cowboy starting pitchers Harrison Bodendorf and Sean Youngerman each threw probably their best outings of the season this weekend.

A 6-foot-5 lefty who transferred from Hawaii, Bodendorf went seven innings Friday night, allowing a lone run off two hits while walking four and striking out 12. It was a season-high in innings pitched, pitches thrown and strikeouts.

That got the Pokes off to a series lead. Then Youngerman nearly clinched the series by himself.

Starting the opening game of Sunday’s doubleheader, Youngerman threw eight scoreless innings. He gave up three hits, didn’t issue a walk and struck out 11. It was just his second start of the season after a five-inning outing against Texas State in mid-February. He had been acting as the Cowboys’ closer.

Youngerman’s performance was all the more impressive given it started a doubleheader, allowing the Cowboys flexibility in a busy day.

2. Brayden Smith’s Hit Streak Extends to 16 Games

Brayden Smith went 7-for-12 at the plate this weekend and has a hit in his past 16 games.

A transfer from Iowa Western Community College, Smith secured that he’ll go at least a calendar month between games without a hit. The last game he went 0-for in was the Cowboys’ March 7 loss to Illinois State.

These past 16 games have seen Smith go 28-for-67 (.418) with 17 runs scored, 19 RBIs, nine doubles, two triples and six home runs.

You might as well put “ballplayer” as Smith’s position, which is another fun aspect to his game. He’s started in all but one of the Pokes’ games this season. Twenty-two of those starts have been in centerfield, but more recently Smith has been playing second base, starting all three games there this weekend.

“He’s a baseball player,” OSU coach Josh Holliday said. “He shows you that. He plays centerfield, he plays second base, he’ll bat leadoff, he’ll bat three hole, he’ll bat two hole, he’ll bunt, he’ll hit the ball the other way, on occasion he’ll hit a home run. But what he is, is an awesome kid. He has a great motor — probably the highest-running motor of our positional playing group.”

3. Could This Be Where the Turnaround Starts?

I’m not sure anyone expected the Cowboys to be a game above .500 and scraping themselves off the bottom of the Big 12 standings at this point in the year. A perennial NCAA Tournament team, the Cowboys were picked to win the Big 12 going into the year.

Things just haven’t come together for OSU all that consistently to this point, with the Cowboys being near the bottom of the Big 12 in runs scored and near the middle in runs allowed. But it came together this weekend. K-State was a top five team in the league in runs scored but mustered just five in three games against OSU.

It’s also been an odd start to league play in general. OSU opened at home against West Virginia but got just one of those games in because of the fires that were burning through the state that weekend. Then the Cowboys went on the road to play a Kansas team that his crushing the baseball. Coming into Sunday, Kansas had 73 home runs on the year — 21 more than the next closest team in the league.

It felt like a bad spot to be running into a K-State team that was atop the Big 12 standings coming into the weekend, but maybe this is where things start to turn around.

“Those boys are humans,” Holliday said. “They have real emotions and feelings. When they feel good about what they’re doing and confident, it makes you look forward to it. It’s just like when you’re struggling, they have real emotions and feelings about how they’re performing, and they don’t like it. Then that’s hard to shrug off.

“I absolutely believe there’s something to that (momentum), for sure. We haven’t had a lot of good bursts of that, and I think today and Friday really helped them feel that for multiple days at a time.”

Josh Holliday’s Postgame News Conference