Wins on Tuesday have not always come easy this year for UCLA baseball.
Prior to Tuesday’s game against the Pepperdine Waves, the Bruins had played seven Tuesday games on the year. In three of them, they were either tied or trailing entering the seventh inning.
There was the no-hit scare against Long Beach State on a Tuesday in late February, the slugfest against UC Irvine on a Tuesday in late April and, most recently, the extra-innings loss at Long Beach State last Tuesday night.
“It’s definitely more difficult playing on Tuesdays because on the weekends we get the series – we get game one, game two, game three,” said junior left fielder Ty Moore. “Tuesday you get one shot, there’s no game two, game three. It’s one and done.”
But there were no such struggles, and no such drama, on Tuesday against Pepperdine (24-22, 14-7 West Coast Conference).
UCLA jumped out to a 6-0 lead after the first three innings and never looked back, winning the game 10-2. The eight-run margin of victory tied UCLA’s largest in any Tuesday game this year.
“We take a lot of pride in Tuesdays, it’s really part of our non conference league I guess you can say,” said coach John Savage. “It’s a big deal for us and RPI-wise.”
The Bruins (34-11, 16-5 Pac-12) were on their game from the very beginning, executing something Savage has preached all season long: hitting the ball the opposite way. In the bottom of the first inning, both of UCLA’s run-scoring hits went to the opposite field.
The player who got one of those hits – Moore – was in a groove all night. After hitting the RBI double to left field in the first, he cranked a three-run home run to right in the second inning, putting the Bruins ahead 5-0. Even when Moore got out in the fourth, it required a head-first diving catch from Pepperdine center fielder Matt Gelalich to make it happen.
“I definitely felt comfortable in the box,” Moore said.
After UCLA built its early lead, it was just a matter of the Bruins preventing history from repeating itself. In UCLA’s first game against Pepperdine this year – on a Tuesday night in early March – the Bruins exploded to a 4-0 lead after one inning but allowed the Waves to get back into it. The game ended in a 5-3 Bruin victory.
But on Tuesday night, starting pitcher Cody Poteet made sure to keep the Waves at bay. Other than a brief sequence in the third inning when Poteet lost control and loaded the bases with one out, the junior was sharp. Poteet finished with the win after going three innings and not allowing a hit or a run.
“Sometimes pitches for me run together, and that’s where I need to get better,” Poteet said. “It’s about going pitch to pitch and in that little sequence (in the third inning) I had trouble doing that.”
After Poteet exited, the backbone of the team – the Bruin bullpen – held up solidly, pitching six innings and only allowing two runs.
With another Tuesday nonconference game in the books, the Bruins will return to Pac-12 action when they head to Tempe, Ariz., this weekend to face the Arizona State Sun Devils.