‘Brock O’Clock’ strikes again: Rodden’s home run pushes Wichita State baseball past OU
Brock Rodden may have cemented his status as the most clutch hitter on the Wichita State baseball team on Tuesday.
The American Athletic Conference Preseason Player of the Year delivered under pressure once again, cranking a go-ahead, three-run home run straight down the right-field line in the bottom of the eighth inning to provide the winning swing in the Shockers’ 8-7 win over Oklahoma at Riverfront Stadium in downtown Wichita.
It was the latest example of “Brock O’Clock,” the term WSU assistant director of communications Denning Gerig has termed on the team’s social media pages to describe the heroics of the Shocker second baseman.
“He left me a breaking ball up in the zone and I was able to put a swing on it and the rest is history,” said Rodden, who was down 1-2 in the count. “It’s a great feeling (running the bases) and you look over in the dugout and you have 30-something guys who are behind me. It makes it a lot easier to go up there and compete knowing I’ve got that many guys behind me no matter what happens.”
Rodden helped WSU keep the good vibes going after three straight run-rule victories in a home sweep of Massachusetts this past weekend. The Shockers also picked up their second victory over OU in the same season for the first time since 2006.
Not a bad time for WSU to reel off four straight wins to improve its record to 14-10 with the opening series in American Athletic Conference play coming up this weekend on the road in Cincinnati.
“It was a perfect night to be a Shocker,” WSU interim coach Loren Hibbs said. “I’m proud of our guys because we’re getting better and I think everybody should be able to see that. The first step in trying to become a good team is putting yourself in situations to win games against good teams. We haven’t gotten it done a few times, but tonight we did.”
With 2,094 in attendance for WSU’s annual downtown game, the Shockers lost control of an early 2-0 lead and saw OU take a 5-2 lead into the bottom of the seventh inning. Rodden, who finished with a career-high five RBI, produced his second RBI hit of the night with a double to left field, then scored when Garrett Pennington followed with his own double to trim the deficit to 5-4 going into the eighth inning.
OU tacked on two runs to its lead in the eighth inning, but WSU responded with a two-out rally in the bottom-half of the inning. The Sooners gifted WSU with an unearned run on a throwing error, then Rodden turned on a pitch with two outs and two strikes.
WSU turned to Cameron Bye in the ninth inning and he struck out the side to earn his first career save.
“The way the dugout (at Riverfront) is positioned, I was literally right on the first-base line,” Hibbs said. “When he hit it, I knew it had a chance. I was just praying it wasn’t going to hook, but he hit it straight as an arrow.”
It was Rodden’s fourth straight multi-hit game and extended his season hitting streak to 18 games. After a slow start (his batting average was .240 after the first six games of the season), Rodden has been hitting .384 at the plate during his hitting streak.
“I’m starting to see the ball better,” Rodden said. “I felt like I was having decent at-bats early in the season and putting barrels on balls, but I was just getting unlucky there for a while, hitting balls hard right at people.”
According to his coach, the advanced analytics say the same thing.
“The data has told us that he is every bit as good, if not better than what he was last year at this point,” Hibbs said. “If you’re just looking in terms of his exit velo and those other things, he is hitting the ball hard. You can’t control where the defense is. You can control putting a good swing on it and he has been putting a lot of good swings on balls this season.”
The opening weekend of AAC play presents an opportunity for WSU to start strong. Cincinnati (11-15) enters with a losing record and was picked in the preseason poll to finish next-to-last in the league this season.
But winning on the road is always a challenge, as the Shockers won just one road series in conference play last season. The team is 4-5 away from home early this season.
“We’re going to keep it rolling into this weekend against Cincinnati,” Rodden said. “We need to take this series and get off on the right foot in conference play. I think we’re playing pretty good baseball right now as a team and we’ve got a lot of guys in the lineup that are seeing the ball really well and swinging it well as a team.”
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