Under the lights of Phoenix Municipal Stadium, on a picture-perfect Friday night, Arizona State redshirt junior outfielder Hunter Jump roamed the grass in left field. Arizona State led in-state rival Arizona 4-3 in the sixth. Arizona sophomore left fielder Tanner O’Tremba stepped into the box to lead off the frame. Facing an 0-1 count, O’Tremba laced a pitch down the left field line.

Jump cut hard to his right at an angle, aiming to cut off the baseball before reaching the corner of the outfield. The left fielder ran into the wall, planting his right foot between the gap in the dirt and the bottom of the fence on the third base line. Suddenly as O’Tremba rounded second, Jump put his hands in the air. The ball sat 10 feet past him down the warning track. In a bizarre twist of fate, the ball wasn’t stuck or lost; it was Jump who was stuck. Arizona cashed in an inside the park home run via ASU’s misfortune.

That’s exactly where Arizona State found itself on Friday night in the second match of the weekend set against the team from down south; they were stuck, and no matter how many runs they scored, they found themselves in a rut time and time again as they dropped the Friday night matchup to UA 7-6.

A never-before-seen occurrence, Sun Devil skipper Tracy Smith explained his perspective of the situation, as there’s no rule in place for when a player is stuck or wedged in a certain position, just the ball.

“I’ve never seen it before,” Smith said. “The fact that nobody was holding him or impeding him from a physical standpoint or the opposition, the fact that he got his foot stuck in a fence, it doesn’t matter, so they let the play happen.”

With a late-game Thursday loss in the rear-view mirror, Arizona State entered the contest supercharged, as the junior leadoff hitter and shortstop Drew Swift roped a triple to open the game. Swift scored on an RBI single from redshirt freshman centerfielder Joe Lampe and the red-hot freshman infielder Sean McLain hit an RBI double to score Lampe. McLain would score on a single later in the frame, hit by redshirt freshman first baseman Nate Baez.

McLain, who logged the aforementioned double in the first and a single in the eighth extended his run of consecutive games with hits to 20, becoming the ninth Sun Devil to do so since 1998, joining the likes of Andre Ethier, Willie Bloomquist, Jeremy West, and Spencer Torkelson. Despite his achievements, the young second baseman was not satisfied.

“It feels pretty special, but at the end of the day, we still lost, so that’s what I’m worried about,” McLain said. “It’s a cool list to be on, and I’m excited. I just want to keep going.”

McLain expanded on his development in his first full year in maroon and gold after a freshman season that was cut short due to COVID-19.

“At this point last year, I was hurt; I wasn’t swinging,” he mentioned. “I’m the same guy I was last year, maybe a little bit better… I think I’m still a young hitter, but I’m working every day to get better.”

Elsewhere on the diamond, redshirt sophomore righty Tyler Thornton received the nod to lead the charge in efforts to tie the series against Arizona. Thornton found himself in several sticky situations early on, stranding two runners in the first and three in the second before the Wildcats finally struck in the third, with a two-out home run to left-center field from sophomore outfielder Ryan Holgate.

Thornton was pulled in the fourth after the Wildcats struck again, this time it was junior center fielder Donta’ Williams, who belted a strike over the wall in right field, tying the game at three runs apiece.

The Sun Devils responded in the fifth, with one of two clutch hits from another rock-solid young player in the batter’s box, freshman third baseman Hunter Haas. The local product from Corona Del Sol High School slotted a ball to the shortstop, who fired an errant throw to first. Haas reached safely, scoring McLain to give ASU a 4-3 advantage.

The freshman struck again in the seventh, singling through the left side, driving home redshirt freshman outfielder Seth Nager, who was brought in to pinch run in the high-pressure scenario. Haas’s RBI sparked another RBI single from Baez.

Baez, McLain, Swift, and Jump all notched two-hit days in the four-plus hour slugfest, but all their hard work, much like on Thursday night, was swept away in the final stages.

Trailing by two and facing off against redshirt freshman lefty Graham Osman, the Wildcat bats came alive while also cashing in on mistakes by the young pitcher. Osman’s first three opponents in the eighth reached base via a single, walk and hit by pitch.

Despite the bases-loaded no outs situation, Smith opted to keep Osman, the only lefty remaining in the bullpen, in the game to face off against the left-handed Williams.

“He was throwing well, we felt with six outs to go and the heart of their order coming up with lefties, it’s more of trying to match up pieces,” Smith explained. “It was a matchup thing. We didn’t have a left hander in the bullpen, so Graham was our only lefty at that point, and we had to stick with him longer than in a traditional sense because we didn’t have another lefty to neutralize those matchups.”

Williams grounded out to first, scoring a run and narrowing the deficit to one. In the next at bat, Osman was crossed up with redshirt senior catcher Sam Ferri, who replaced redshirt senior Nick Cheema behind the dish at the onset of the inning. With the miscommunication, Ferri let the ball by, scoring another tun to tie.

Freshman designated hitter Jacob Berry put the nail in the coffin in the next at-bat, singling up the middle and clearing the basepaths.

Arizona State tried to muster a response in the final two home frames but couldn’t respond to its eighth-inning collapse.

For the second night in a row, an inexperienced Sun Devil roster found themselves up and ahead throughout the contest but defeated on the walk back to the locker room. Smith chalked it up to inexperience and a lack of execution in the final stages.

“I like the way we played; I think we fought hard and competed all the way through. (Arizona) is a good ballclub, and we are going to have to play really good, clean baseball to beat them because their offense is real,” Smith said. “I can’t sit here and say we deserved the win because clearly, we didn’t do what we needed to do in the eighth inning; we handed it to them.”

Smith and Arizona State return for the third game of the series on Saturday evening back at Phoenix Muni. First pitch is slated for 7 pm.

“We still have a young ballclub that’s competing hard, so I’m not going to beat on that,” he said. “Overall, what I’m looking for is that we make sure we’re continuing to compete, and if we play like that, we will compete like that, and if we do that over the course of the season, I truly believe we will be on the positive side of the win-loss ledger at the end, but these two games, it didn’t happen.”