Horned Frogs knock out Rebels

Published 11:25 am Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Once TCU got rolling, no one at the College Station Regional — even Ole Miss — could stand in its way.

Josh Elander and Jantzen Witte both hit solo home runs, Kyle Von Tungeln drove in the go-ahead run with a single in the fifth inning, and the Horned Frogs completed a supercharged run to the regional title by beating Ole Miss 7-4 on Monday night.

After losing to the Rebels in the regional opener, TCU scored 50 runs while winning four consecutive elimination games. The other three teams in the regional scored a total of 39 runs in nine games.

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TCU (40-20) advanced to the super regional round for the third time in four seasons. It will face UCLA in a best-of-three series in Los Angeles. The Horned Frogs have a 26-7 record since April 6.

“Other than winning the super regional and some games in Omaha, this is obviously a big day in the history of our program just by the way we went about it — coming out of the losers’ bracket and being down 9-6 in the second game, and competing against Texas A&M in their park, and then Ole Miss,” TCU coach Jim Schlossnagle said.

Ole Miss (37-26) played in a regional for the ninth time in 10 seasons, and reached the regional title game for the sixth time. The Rebels, however, failed to advance to a super regional for the third straight season. After winning two straight games to start the College Station Regional, they lost two in a row to TCU.

“As a coach, you’re never prepared for this moment and quite what to say,” Ole Miss coach Mike Bianco said. “They just played better than we did. We showed a lot of guts. Bobby (Wahl) and Mike (Mayers), on very short rest, came out and pitched their hearts out. But TCU was just a better club tonight and yesterday. I would say they found themselves here, especially offensively.”

If TCU found itself, it lost a lot of baseballs at Texas A&M’s Blue Bell Park. The Horned Frogs hit 10 home runs in their march to the title — eight more than the rest of the teams in the regional combined. Elander and Witte both went deep in the fourth inning Monday to put TCU ahead 2-1.

“Those were just a couple of bad pitches on my part,” said Ole Miss starter Bobby Wahl, who went 41⁄3 innings while pitching on two days’ rest. “I left two fastballs up high and they got good swings off of them.”

Ole Miss went back in front in the fifth inning with an RBI single by Alex Yarbrough and a sacrifice fly by Zach Kirksey, but didn’t keep the lead for long. An RBI groundout by Keaton Jones brought in the tying run in the bottom of the fifth, and Von Tungeln drove in the go-ahead run with a single up the middle.

TCU added two more runs on an RBI double by Brance Rivera in the sixth inning, and made it 7-3 with two more runs in the seventh on RBI singles by Witte and Derek Odell.

Ole Miss didn’t score again until the ninth. Back-to-back singles and a fielder’s choice put runners at the corners with one out, then Tanner Mathis singled through the right side of the infield to cut it to 7-4 and bring the tying run to the plate. Yarbrough hit a grounder to second, though, and the Horned Frogs rolled up the double play to end the game and punch their ticket to the West Coast.

“We just didn’t get the hits,” Yarbrough said.