Time and time again, no game has shown such a consistent ability to turn on a dime quite like baseball. After slugging their way to three wins in their first four games, racking up 47 runs in the process, Arizona State’s (3-2) loud bats were silenced by Landon Beidelschies, who would toss seven innings of one-run ball to propel the Buckeyes (3-2) to an 11-4 victory on Thursday.
In a rare four-game set to kick off the weekend, the Sun Devils would have just one day off between their head-turning midweek win over Kansas State before having to turn around against a top 80 2025 MLB Draft Prospect (Future Star Series). With Beidelschies’s heater from the high left side sitting in the mid-90s, ASU would have no answer at the plate. Meanwhile, the Buckeyes backed up the sophomore sensation with 11 runs offensively, helping secure a comfortable win for the road team, leaving skipper Willie Bloomquist more than miffed at his team’s performance.
“I didn’t have these guys ready to play today, and it showed," Bloomquist admitted. "They were embarrassing from the offensive standpoint. Didn’t stick with the plan in any way, shape, or form that we had going into that guy.”
Looking to throw Beidelschies off his game early, ASU manufactured a first-inning run via Harris Williams, who led off the frame wearing a pitch, stole second, and moved over to third and home on consecutive outs to open the scoring.
Making his second career start and first at ASU, sophomore left-hander Ben Jacobs came to play from the first pitch. Going up against a Buckeye lineup that had been struggling mightily through four games (.206 team batting average), Jacobs set the tone by striking out the side in the first before navigating through the fourth, allowing just one hit and ringing up seven batters.
While Jacobs hummed along, Beidelschies would settle in on the bump, dotting the strike zone with a 95-mile-an-hour heater that the Sun Devils couldn’t catch up to. Only Steven Ondina and Kevin Karstetter would manage hits from the second through the fourth, which ASU couldn’t bring around to stake Jacobs to a lead.
With his pitch count increasing and lacking cushion from the offensive end, Jacobs would run out of gas in the fifth, surrendering three extra-base hits, including a two-run shot by Trey Lipsey to give the Buckeyes a lead they would not relinquish.
“Proud of myself that I was able to fill up the zone today,” Jacobs said. “But, I can execute pitches a little better. Definitely something to build off of.”
“Ben was one of the bright spots,” Bloomquist emphasized. “Threw the ball very well. Just disappointed we couldn’t extend the lead with him throwing the way he was. He deserved better than that.”
After the three-run fifth, Beidelschies would only further his dominance over a Sun Devil lineup that scored 47 runs in their first four games. Setting down ASU in order in the fifth before breezing through a five-pitch sixth, Beidelschies fully exposed an underprepared Devils team and christened them with his flurry of fastballs in seven masterful innings.
“We scored a lot of runs in the first four games,” Jacob Tobias recalled. “So it could’ve been, ‘We’re good at this, we don’t have to really lock in because we’re going to hit.’ We have to understand it’s not that, and every game has to be focused and locked in to have those results…The biggest thing is lack of focus. Did not take that team as seriously as we should’ve. It showed that we didn’t execute tonight. Guy threw the ball well, but I feel like we just have to make more adjustments and be smarter with our at-bats.”
“18-22-year-old kids that think they’ve got it figured out after four games,” Bloomquist quipped. “Bottom line, I’ll take the responsibility for not locking these guys in better. We talked about it, but I sensed today that they were a little bit not as focused as they should’ve been.”
Even for Beidelschies carving them up for seven strikeouts and just three hits, Bloomquist thought his team still had the opportunity to do damage and simply didn’t do so.
“If we would’ve stuck with the plan going into it and paid attention to what we had preached for the game plan, I think we would have had the pitches to hit that we were expecting,” Bloomquist noted. “We just weren’t ready. When you’re not ready against a guy throwing 94, 95 miles-an-hour, you’re going to get owned.”
With hitting staple Nu’u Contrades day-to-day with a back ailment, aside from a near-meaningless three-run home run from Ryan Campos in the eighth, the bats were all but out of commission for ASU.
In response, Bloomquist deployed a handful of bullpen arms to hold the Buckeye’s offense down, to no avail. Jonah Giblin would get dinged for two long balls in the seventh, Josh Butler let in two runs in the eighth, and Rohan Lettow gave up three more in the ninth to cement the statement win for Ohio State and drive home the letdown from the home dugout, soiling Jacobs’s stellar start while dropping the series opener.
“He (Jacobs) set that pace that we wanted to set from inning one, and we didn’t pick him up,” Tobias said. “That’s on us. He couldn’t have done anything more than what he did today.”
“We didn’t play very well tonight all the way around,” Bloomquist admitted. “Today was extremely disappointing.”
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