ROLLA, Mo. – With no actual games taking place right now due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, we want to look back at some significant events that took place during the 2019-20 athletic season and break down various elements of those games.

Today, we'll take a look at the baseball team's 23-4 win on March 7 over Rockhurst to close this series of articles.
 
THE SET-UP: The Miners – with a number of new faces on the roster – got off to a slow start as they dropped seven of their first eight games of the season.  But following those first eight games, Missouri S&T swept a four-game series from Upper Iowa as it prepared for its Great Lakes Valley Conference opener against Rockhurst, a team the Miners swept on the final weekend of the 2019 season to help them gain a share of the GLVC's regular season title.

The Hawks were off to a 7-5 start on the year heading into its conference opener, but were just 2-9 against the Miners since the start of the 2017 season and had allowed an average of nearly eight runs per game over those 11 contests.  In the Miners' three-game sweep in 2019, S&T outscored the Hawks 34-9.

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE GAME: The Hawks won the first game of the doubleheader that afternoon as Jack Eisenbarger and reliever Thomas Jones shut down the Miners over the final seven innings of a 4-2 victory.  But as game two began on a windy afternoon in Kansas City, the Miners jumped all over the Rockhurst pitching staff in the early innings.

S&T got on the scoreboard right off the bat, as Will Hayes (Terre Haute, IN/South Vigo) was hit by the second pitch of the game and went to second on a wild pickoff throw.  Two batters later, Keegan Baxmeyer (Waterloo, IL/Freeburg) hit a ground rule double in the gap in left center to score Hayes with the first run of the contest, then Baxmeyer scored moments later on a hit by Doug Wood (Liberty, MO/Liberty North).

Miner starter Chasen Anderson (Moscow Mills, MO/Troy Buchanan) got a double play ball to get out of the bottom half of the first inning unscathed, then S&T added onto its lead with a five-run outburst in the second.  Dakota Sill (Lansing, KS/Lansing) drew a walk to open the inning and stole second, then AJ Marsh (High Ridge, MO/Seckman) was hit by a pitch with one out.  Those two runners scored on a double off the bat of Brady Wildschuetz (Foristell, MO/Francis Howell), who would score himself on a two-out double by Wood.  The Miners would add two more run-scoring hits in the frame, a single by Baxmeyer and a double by Michael Ward (Hazelwood, MO/Hazelwood West), which in turn chased Hawk starter Michael Hellman before the second came to a close.

S&T put two more runs on the scoreboard in the third on a sacrifice fly by Wildschuetz and a bases loaded walk to Ward to take a 9-0 lead after two and one-half innings, with the Hawks already on their fourth hurler of the game by the time that inning ended.

The Hawks got into the scoring column with two runs in the third and held the Miners scoreless in the fourth, but Anderson set Rockhurst down in order in the bottom of the fourth before the S&T offense got rolling again in the fifth, doing nearly all of the damage with two outs.

Ward reached base with a one-out double and was on third with two outs when Wood slammed his first home run of the season to make it 11-2.  The Miners weren't finished in the inning, as Matt Miller (St. Louis, MO/Oakville) drew a walk and Sill reached on an infield single; a throwing error on the play sent Miller on to third.  S&T then executed a double steal for its third run of the inning as Miller crossed the plate.

The merry-go-round continued in the sixth with the Miners broke loose for six more runs.  S&T loaded the bases with one out and got its first run when Baxmeyer was hit by a pitch to prompt another Rockhurst pitching change.  Nathan Miller, the seventh pitcher to be used by the Hawks in the game, hit Wood with a pitch to force another runner across the plate, then Cole Hampton (Edwardsville, IL/Edwardsville) followed with a ground rule double to score two more runs.

S&T's last two runs in the sixth came courtesy of a hit by Sill brought in Wood and Hampton.

After the Hawks scored two unearned runs with two outs in the bottom of the sixth, the Miners put five additional runs on the board in the seventh off Rockhurst's eighth pitcher of the game.  Two walks and a hit batter to begin the inning loaded the bases, then a sacrifice fly by Jaden Courtois (Festus, MO/Jefferson) plated the first run.  S&T loaded the bases again when Wood got his fourth hit of the game on an infield single, then Hampton cleared them with a grand slam to complete the scoring for the Miners.

BETWEEN THE NUMBERS: The Miners recorded a season-high 22 hits in the contest; they had not had 22 hits in back-to-back games since the first two games of their 2019 series against Missouri-St. Louis. … Wood had his first four-hit game as Miner and drove in a career-high five runs. … Hampton drove in six runs – all in the final two innings – the most RBI by a Miner in a game since Zach Bracken (Berthoud, CO/Berthoud) knocked in six against UMSL on April 12, 2019 and hit the Miners' only grand slam of the season (Bracken had also hit S&T's last grand slam on that date). … The game was the first in which two Miners had driven in five runs apiece since March 12, 2018, when Bracken had seven RBI and Lucas Swindle knocked in five in a win over Upper Iowa. … Anderson allowed just four hits and two earned runs in 5 2/3 innings on the mound. … The 23 runs scored by the Miners were the most ever in a GLVC contest and third-most in a game in program history.
 
THE POST-SCRIPT: The offensive onslaught continued the next day as the Miners took the rubber game of the series by a 16-11 count, scoring five runs in the top of the ninth after scoring two in the eighth to tie the game.  That victory moved the Miners to 7-8 on the season as they prepared to take on the GLVC's pre-season favorite, Bellarmine, in a series the following weekend.  Unfortunately for S&T, that series and every game that followed on the schedule was ultimately canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, putting a premature end to the Miners' 2020 campaign.  By winning the series at Rockhurst, the finished their abbreviated season with wins in six of their final seven games.