Oscar Alvarez/Daily Bruin Senior Casey Grzecka
swings and misses in Sunday’s 17-4 series finale against Stanford,
giving the Cardinal a 2-1 series win and dooming UCLA’s playoff
hopes.
By Scott Bair
Daily Bruin Staff
[email protected]
Sunday’s game was tough to watch. The 1,673 fans in
attendance watched in dismay as the Stanford Cardinal dismantled
the hometown UCLA Bruins by a score of 17-4. UCLA watched aghast,
as Stanford accumulated hit after hit and home run after home run.
They sat in frustration as the dreams of a postseason slipped
farther away.
The spectator who felt the most pain watching Sunday’s
game was not marked in the attendance totals. He sat in his seat on
the Bruin bench and watched as a sense of helplessness built inside
of him.
Casey Janssen looked down at the high-tech brace covering his
left leg from mid-thigh to ankle with utter disdain. The brace and
the newly reconstructed ACL ligament in his knee kept him from his
rightful place.
It was Sunday. Janssen should have been on the mound. It hurt
not to use his 4-2 record and commanding pitches to help his team
win. It was the brace that made him a spectator.
He watched as the Bruins (26-30, 9-12) played themselves into
contention with a 9-4 victory Saturday. The Bruins came back after
a disheartening 11-0 loss Friday night and, with the exception of a
sixth inning that featured three Bruin errors, UCLA played like a
playoff-bound team.
Janssen watched Brandon Averill, who had two errors in the
sixth, rebound and hit a home run in the bottom half of the same
inning.
Janssen watched Wes Whisler tie Chase Utley’s
single-season freshman home run record with a grand slam to the
opposite field in the eighth.
But it was Billy Susdorf who put the Bruins ahead for good with
a clutch two-RBI single in the seventh.
“I was 0-6 before that,” Susdorf said. “I
would have walked Whisler to get to me too. Statistically, it was a
good call on their part, but I wanted to make them pay for it. The
pitcher hung a curveball and I drove it to left.”
A fierce competitor who wears his emotions on his sleeve,
Janssen was relegated to spectator duty against the Cardinal
(37-16, 13-8). He could have been the one to secure a series win
with a solid game on Sunday.
Bruin pitching coach Gary Adcock could’ve used overworked
pitcher Doug Silva to shut the door if necessary. However,
Sunday’s starter ran out of gas after four innings ““ a
Janssenian effort was not in the cards. The eight relievers who
followed allowed 12 runs, and with the loss went UCLA’s
playoff hopes.
“It’s hard for me, especially when we’re
playing the best team in the conference,” Janssen said.
“It’s even tougher when the pitching staff gets hit
like that. It’s frustrating that there’s nothing I can
do to help this team win.”
It seems ironic that right when the Bruins started to gel as a
team, key components to Bruin success started to drop off the depth
chart because of injury. UCLA head coach Gary Adams said that the
staff never speculated about how much better the team would be if
Janssen and captain Ben Francisco were still in the lineup.
“It would make a difference of probably three or four
conference wins,” UCLA head coach Gary Adams said. “It
would have definitely made a difference in the playoff picture. I
don’t think we’ve ever discussed what we lost this
season because there are too many things to focus on in the
present.”
With the brace constantly attached to his leg as a reminder,
Janssen has nothing but time to think about how different
Sunday’s game would have been, with Silva to back him up, if
he could have taken the mound.
With reports from Ben Peters, Daily Bruin Contributor.