OU baseball is now team to beat in College World Series after clutch win over Georgia
· Yahoo Sports
Xander Mercurius blew a fastball past the most dangerous hitter in college baseball.
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Strikeout swinging.
Inning over.
The OU freshman pitcher made sure Daniel Jackson knew about it, too, uttering a few words and staring down the Georgia slugger who has won pretty much every individual award in the sport this season. It was a look that said Mercurius meant business, that he wasn’t afraid.
That’s a look the Sooners are giving everyone in college baseball.
But more important are these numbers: 2-0.
That’s the Sooners' record in the Men’s College World Series after dispatching the Bulldogs on Monday night in Omaha. Of the last 35 champions crowned, 29 started the tournament by winning their first two games.
They’ve stayed out of the loser’s bracket and in the driver’s seat.
OU is behind the wheel of a Mack truck — and everyone better look out.
“To play in this thing right here,” Sooner coach Skip Johnson said after the game, “you gotta be tough kids, you gotta be tough teams. There’s not one team that’s been in this whole World Series that ain’t tough.”
But right now, no team looks any tougher to beat than these Sooners.
They now have two games to win one to make the best-of-three championship final. Either Texas or Georgia will be waiting on Wednesday with another game to be played on Thursday if necessary.
And OU has two big things going for it: momentum and pitching setup.
The Sooners are the hottest team in college baseball, and it’s not just that they’ve won seven in a row, the longest current streak of any team in the nation. They have caught fire in a way that is almost impossible to wrap your brain around.
OU was sweating whether it would make the SEC Tournament.
Not the NCAA Tournament. The SEC one.
Then the Sooners were one-and-done in the conference tournament. Because the SEC is so deep, the assumption was they’d make the NCAA Tournament. But making the MCWS and playing in Omaha? It seemed unlikely they’d even survive regionals.
But since losing to Georgia Tech in the second game of regionals, OU has not lost and has outscored opponents 72-31.
Average winning score: 10.3-4.4.
What’s more, the Sooners have hit 21 of their 86 home runs this season in the NCAA Tournament. That’s an almost unbelievable 24.4% of all their homers, a power surge that has come at a time when they're playing the best teams in the nation and facing the highest stakes of the season.
OU hit two more Monday night against Georgia, and both were huge.
The first came in the first inning off the bat of shortstop Jaxon Willits, and it gave the Sooners an early 3-0 lead against a Bulldog team that led the nation in home runs.
OU knew it was going to have to put up some runs to have a chance, and that early crooked number was big for confidence. In the Sooner hitters, yes, but also for Mercurius, the freshman pitcher who was starting just his fourth game of the entire season.
“My teammates putting up runs in the first inning, helping me out,” Mercurius said, “just can’t do it without my teammates.”
That early run support helped him settle in, and Mercurius threw a gem, allowing only three runs and six hits over 7⅓ innings while he struck out nine and walked two. Yes, he gave up three solo homers, but hitting bombs is what Georgia does. It entered the game having hit a nation-leading 175 homers.
The two other teams that have blasted that many homers in a season have won national titles.
Georgia still might, but the Bulldogs have to go through the Sooners to get there — and right now, those odds don’t look great.
The momentum, after all, isn’t the only thing on OU’s side.
Now that the Sooners get an off day before playing again, they will play Wednesday having gone four days between games. That makes it possible for OU ace Cord Rager to throw again.
He opened the MCWS with a dominating seven-inning performance against Alabama, shutting out the Crimson Tide while scattering three hits and striking out eight. In his three NCAA Tournament starts, he’s pitched 19 innings and allowed only three earned runs.
If Rager doesn’t throw Wednesday and the Sooners lose, he would certainly throw Thursday in the must-win game.
Then if OU advances to the championship series starting on Saturday, Mercurius would be in position to start the opener.
Obviously, that’s all a ways down the line, but a hot-hitting team having a chance to put its hot-throwing aces back on the mound makes the Sooners a team to be reckoned with.
But even after Monday’s game, Johnson wasn’t ready to separate his team from the pack. He said the Sooners were much like the rest of the teams in Omaha.
“They play for each other,” he said. “That’s why they’re here. That’s why they’re one of the eight.”
Still, if you look at the Sooners from the other dugout, they surely look a little different. Like they mean business. Like they aren’t afraid. Like they could just win the whole darn thing.
Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at [email protected]. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK, follow her at @jennicarlsonok.bsky.social and twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok, and support her work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: OU baseball is team to beat in College World Series after Georgia win