TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — Murray State’s inaugural appearance in the Missouri Valley Conference Baseball Championship has ended with today’s 4-3 loss to Missouri State in the 12th game of the event at Bob Warn Field on the Indiana State campus.
The loss ends the Racers’ first season in The Valley at 31-28, which was their third straight 30-win season and fourth straight winning campaign under Head Coach Dan Skirka. Mo State (33-22) will play the winner of this afternoon’s matchup between host and heavily-favored regular season champion Indiana State and an Evansville team that defeated the Racers by one run in comeback fashion Thursday night.
A fielding error gave the second-seeded Bears the edge as it came with two outs in the top of the ninth inning after the Racers had erase a two-run deficit. Two painful memories of this game for Murray State will be the seventh and eighth innings as the Racers, after tying the game at 3-3 in the fifth, had the go-ahead runs on third base in both of those innings with less than two outs but could not get those runners home.
One of those situations ended with Carson Garner lining into a double play in the seventh on a ball he sent down the first-base line.Â
Brennan McCullough, who had a red hot bat in Terre Haute, finished the tourney in style with three hits and an RBI Friday. However, he was the only Racer with more than one hit. His single in the third pulled Murray State within 2-1 and Drew Vogel’s RBI single in the fifth cut the deficit to 3-2. Ethan Krizen’s sacrifice fly finally tied the game at 3-3 in the sixth after Mo State set the tone with two runs in the second and another in the fifth.
The win for the Bears avenged a 6-1 loss to the Racers on Wednesday night. Mo State took two of three games from the Racers during their regular-season series in Murray.Â
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