Baseball sends waves of pitchers upon Pepperdine in midweek win

It was a joint effort on the mound for the Bruins.

No. 1 UCLA baseball (35-7, 14-4 Pac-12) took down Pepperdine (19-18, 10-8 West Coast Conference) 8-5 on Tuesday, using seven pitchers along the way.

With sophomore right-hander Zach Pettway out with a forearm strain, coach John Savage had to rearrange his rotation, slotting freshman right-hander Sean Mullen in for his first collegiate start. He threw three shutout innings before Savage pulled him from the game.

According to Mullen, this was the strategy going into the game.

“The plan was to limit my pitch count because I hadn’t been used in the starter role,” Mullen said. “You don’t want to just go out and blow the doors in, you want to be smart about it.”

On offense, the Bruins provided early run support for the rookie pitcher.

In the top of the second, senior designated hitter Jake Pries stepped up to the plate for his first at-bat against the Waves since his freshman year. He gave the Bruins a 1-0 lead with one swing of the bat, launching his seventh homer of the year deep to left field.

“The starting pitcher threw me a fastball that I just missed on the first pitch,” Pries said. “Then he threw me a little slider that kind of hung, and I put a good swing on it.”

UCLA extended its lead in the third after sophomore right fielder Garrett Mitchell reached base on an infield single and junior third baseman Ryan Kreidler drove him in with his team leading 12th double of the year. Kreidler advanced to third on the throw home and scored on a sacrifice fly from junior left fielder Jack Stronach.

The Bruins scored again in the fourth and put two more across in the fifth to make it four consecutive innings with at least one run, pushing their lead to 6-0.

“I thought this was one of our more consistent games of the year,” Pries said. “We had no really big inning, but we kind of just chipped away the whole game.”

On the mound, sophomore right-hander Michael Townsend took over for Mullen in the bottom of the fourth and pitched a 1-2-3 inning. However, Townsend ran into trouble when he came back out for the fifth and surrendered a two-out RBI double to second baseman Wyatt Young, followed by a throwing error from Kreidler that put two runners on.

Freshman right-hander Jack Filby replaced Townsend as the Bruins’ third pitcher of the day and gave up his first home run of the year to Brandt Belk on a three-run shot that made it 6-4.

UCLA responded in the top of the sixth with a two-out rally of its own. Mitchell reached first with his third hit of the game, stole second and scored on an RBI single from junior second baseman Chase Strumpf.

In the bottom of the sixth, the pitching staff faced its tightest situation of the game after junior right-hander Felix Rubi took over for Filby with two runners on. Back-to-back singles put another run across for the Waves and loaded the bases with just one out for Young.

However, Rubi got the double play ball on the first pitch, ending the inning and preserving the Bruins’ 7-5 lead.

“Rubi is a ground ball guy and he got the ground ball right at the right time,” Savage said. “That was the pivotal play of the game.”

UCLA scored for the sixth straight inning in the top of the seventh, this time on a bases-loaded groundout from sophomore shortstop Kevin Kendall that made it 8-5.

Working with a three-run cushion, the Bruins turned the game over to their late-inning relievers in the bottom of the seventh. Redshirt senior right-hander Nathan Hadley, junior right-hander Kyle Mora and sophomore right-hander Holden Powell combined to close out the game with three hitless innings.

“Sometimes it’s a luxury that we take for granted, giving the ball to those guys every night and knowing that they’re going to put us in a really good position to win,” Mullen said. “They don’t get enough credit for what they do for our team, because having guys like that really eases minds.”

UCLA will next play a three-game series at Arizona State starting Friday at 7 p.m.