The Grand Canyon University baseball team (9-1) picked up a pair of thrilling walk-off wins over visiting UW-Milwaukee (3-3) Friday at Brazell Stadium in Phoenix, Ariz.
"I'm proud of the fact that the guys didn't get discouraged and stayed in it," said head coach Andy Stankiewicz. "The guys did a nice job of putting together some good at-bats in the seventh (game one) and the freshman (Greg Saenz) comes in and gets the squeeze down. It's exciting to see some of these young freshman take advantage of these opportunities they are getting."
Down by a run heading into the bottom of the seventh, the Antelopes plated a pair of runs to pick up the 2-1 come-from-behind win.
Paul Panaccione recorded an RBI single to score
Ben Mauseth to tie the score at 1-1 and
Greg Saenz laid down a suicide-squeeze bunt to score David Walker and give the Lopes a walk-off win.
Andrew Naderer toed the rubber for all seven innings en route to picking up his third win of the year, fanning nine and allowing just three hits.
In game two, the Lopes came out on top of the back-and-forth 11-inning affair, winning the offensive shootout, 10-9.
Freshman
Garrison Schwartz delivered a walk-off RBI single in the bottom of the 11
th to propel Canyon to the 10-9 victory. GCU scored three times in each the second and fifth innings to pick up its second win of the day.
Panaccione and
Matt Haggerty highlighted the contest, both smacking home runs to lead the GCU offensive attack. Hagerty went yard in his first at-bat of the season. Schwartz, Panaccione and Brandon Smith all had three hits in the night cap.
The Lopes and Panthers will play a doubleheader Saturday, with first pitch in game one slated for 1:30 p.m. Fans unable to make it out can follow the action via a link for live results at
www.gculopes.com.
GCU 2, UW-Milwaukee 1GCU 10, UW-Milwaukee 9 (11)