OSU Baseball: Cowboys Hoping to Peak at Right Time, Pitching Stats Say They Might Be

STILLWATER — There isn’t another pitching staff heading to the Athens Regional that is as hot as the Cowboys’.

Oklahoma State is 9-2 in the month of May entering this weekend’s NCAA Regional that also features Georgia, Duke and Binghamton. That marks a better winning percentage this month than the other three teams in the Regional, and much of that can be credited to OSU’s hurlers.

Up until May, OSU had a team ERA of 4.82 — a mark that ranked second (behind Duke) among teams who will be in Athens this weekend. But since the start of the month, OSU has a 2.64 team ERA. The next closest Athens Regional team in that category is Georgia at 4.39.

“You always want to find your best,” OSU coach Josh Holliday said. “Sometimes you find it early, sometimes you get it in the middle and if you can ever capture it at the end and ride it, what better time to find it?

“I will tell you just in the unique coaching conversations you have with your friends, there’s some great baseball teams in this field right now whose coaches are panicked because they’re 4-10 in their last 14 games. So, when you talk to your friends and you hear in their voice while their overall might be impressive, where they’re at right now for them is concerning.”

In particular, it’s been the Cowboys’ starters getting the job done. The trio of Harrison Bodendorf, Sean Youngerman and Mario Pesca combined to have a 2.13 ERA this month, giving up just 16 earned runs in 67 2/3 innings pitched.

OSU has gone from giving up 5.6 runs a game in games played before May to 3.3 runs a game in May.

Bodendorf has been special for much of the year. A Big 12 Co-Newcomer of the Year after transferring from Hawaii, the 6-foot-5 lefty is 10-1 on the season. He became the first Cowboy to earn 10 wins in a season since Jensen Elliott hit the mark in 2019.

It’s been a solid close to an excellent career for OSU pitching coach Rob Walton, who announced earlier in the month that he’ll retire at season’s end.

“I think it’s just we stuck to our plan that we followed all fall and kind of the way we were working towards being as a staff,” Bodendorf said. “Maybe we didn’t start out that way. We had some issues going along, but we just kept working at it. Rob kept working with all of us. Kind of just the stuff that we were trying to do all season is finally kind of falling into place these last couple weeks for us.”

Offensively, the Cowboys are actually hitting (according to average) slightly worse in May than they were prior. Their .242 bating average this month is lowest among teams going to Athens, but a big area for improvement over the past month has been strikeout numbers.

OSU struck out 10.8 times a game pre-May and have trimmed that number down to 6.9 times a game this month.

“For us, I haven’t had a good sleep in 15 weeks until two nights ago,” Holliday said. “I say that jokingly. We’ve been pushing hard and grinding. That fight and grind has put us in a position now to feel good about where we’re at, but now we got a great challenge. I would always take your best at the end, but I’d love to have that peace at some point in the year. This year is one of those years we just didn’t get one of those early streaks, but we sure kept pursuing it.”

The Athens Regional in May