Aidan Major

MORGANTOWN — They’ve been giving Randy Mazey going-away gifts as he goes through his final days as West Virginia’s baseball coach, having announced his retirement at season’s end, but now he has given the WVU program a gift to remember him by — their first trip to an NCAA Super Regional in the school’s 132-year baseball history.

Mazey spoke openly before the game about wanting — and needing — a big offensive performance and got it as the Mountaineers swept their way through the Tucson Regional as a No. 3 seed, completing it with a 10-6 victory over Grand Canyon University of the WAC.

The Mountaineers banged out 17 hits with seven of their starters recording multiple hit performances. JJ Wetherholt and Logan Sauve, the top two hitters in the lineup, both had three hits.

But it was the Mountaineer bullpen that cut short Grand Canyon’s dreams of forcing a Monday elimination game when starter Hayden Cooper failed to retire any of the five batters he faced. Aiden Major, who had been sidelined since May 5, stabilized the situation and combined with Carson Estridge to take the game into the ninth with a six-run lead.

A two-run home run by Zach Yorke in the ninth provided enough of a scare that Mazey reached into his bullpen for Derek Clark to get the final two outs despite Clark having thrown a complete game on Friday.

After the final out, a Clark strikeout, Mazey enjoyed the traditional Gatorade bath.

As play started, West Virginia had everything lined up for success. To begin with, they had to win only one of two games to reach the Super Regional while Grand Canyon had to win out of the loser’s bracket in an early Sunday game.

And when they got to the ballpark, they were greeted by 100 degrees of desert heat and wound up having to fight through it for their lives, falling behind Dallas Baptist by 8-3 before coming back to win, 14-12, in a strength sapping battle.

With that accomplished, they had to come back for a night meeting with a WVU team whose pitching was in solid shape and a team rested and eager to get on with it.

But Mazey was cautious, not wanting his team to take anything for granted at this stage. His message was a simple one to his team.

“Don’t think about anything other than the fundamentals. Don’t think ahead, don’t think about seeding, don’t think about records, don’t think about anything other than what you have to do to win the first inning of this game,” he told them.

They did just that, or so it seemed as they scored two quick runs for a 2-0 lead on a night when Mazey was hoping for an offensive breakout. While the pitching of Derek Clark and Tyler Switalski had been immaculate, the offense had been stagnant.

“We need to have a game where we just score a lot,” Mazey said. “We haven’t had one of those. It’s been weeks since we scored in double digits, especially on the road. need some sort of a breakout game.”

He got it.

By the middle of the fifth inning WVU had its double digits with a 10-3 lead with 15 bases hits, Logan Sauve leading the way with three hits, a triple, and three RBI

But, somehow, it again was the pitching and not the offense that controlled the game. Starter Hayden Cooper failed to retire any of the five batters he faced before Mazey called upon Aiden Major from the bullpen to restore sanity. Major had missed virtually all of May with an injury and was put into a difficult situation.

The game in the bottom of the first was tied at 2-2 with the bases loaded and none out when Aiden entered. How sharp he would be and how far he could go were all gigantic question marks, but he answered them with an overpowering performance to allow the Mountaineer offense to take control of the game.

Pitching more on guts and memory than anything else, Major gave up only two hits until exiting with the bases loaded in the fifth with a 10-4 lead, turning the game over to Carson Estridge, who worked out of the jam with a strikeout.

Estridge took the game into the ninth inning before turning it over to Maxx Yehl, who gave up a two-run home run to Zach Yorke, forcing Mazey to bring in Clark to put the game away just two days after pitching a 101-pitch complete game victory over Dallas Baptist.