Husker Baseball vs Texas A&M
The Aggies quickly went down 5-0 to an unyielding Nebraska offense, led by a 3-run homer from Brandon Buckman. He’s now got 11 notches in his HR belt this season, all of them to dead right field. He hit the RF foul pole today… He’s a typical lefty, I suppose.
The A&M offense seemed to take a deep breath when Joba exited in the 7th inning, and started to peck away at the UNL bullpen. They scored one run in each in the 7th and 8th, before closer Brett Jensen came in to put the game in the books. He was roughed up for a couple runs by Iowa in a crazy 14 inning 16-14 game on Tuesday, and seemed off again tonight. He allowed two runs to come across in the top of the ninth, and with the tying runner on second, struck out the last batter looking. Jensen is unhittable when he’s on, but when he’s not… you get games like tonight and the Iowa game.
Using the great win expectancy calculator at Walk-Off Balk, and borrowing an idea from Jeff at Lookout Landing, I made a chart showing the chances the Huskers would win tonight. I had to manually enter each play in the game, which took a while, so don’t expect these all to often. I’ll definitely do them for regional through CWS games, though. (Knock on wood…)
[Click the image to see a full-size, readable version]
You can see that even though it seemed like Jensen was about to blow the game in the 9th, historically, UNL’s chances were still very good that they would win.
I’m not going to be able to go to the other two games this weekend, since I’m going to be in Omaha for Easter. A&M is better than their 19-18 record, and I hope UNL can get through this series unscathed. A&M’s weakness is their offense, but the Husker batters should be able to get to their staff. I’m optimistic.