BlueandGoldnews.com WVU’s Jack Kartsonas threw 111 pitches over 6 2/3 innings in earning his fifth win on Sunday.

MORGANTOWN — This was a weekend which defined just what West Virginia University’s baseball team is made of, a weekend where they faced as much adversity as any team ever who walked away with a sweep.

In the Mountaineers’ case, the sweep of UCF was its fourth straight in Big 12 play, 14 consecutive conference wins from Provo, Utah, to Morgantown, to Houston, Texas, back to Morgantown and on to Orlando, Florida.

It is 14 games in which they have scored 136 runs, which is 9.7 per game.

It has been wild and wonderful, as they like to say in West Virginia, but nothing has been like in the three days down the road from the Walt Disney World Resort and may never be.

On Friday they played a game in which they won by 4-1 despite collecting just one base hit, a single by Kyle West, but in which six Mountaineer hitters were hit by pitches, leadoff batter Skylar King tying a school record by being hit three times himself.

On Saturday they gave up 10 runs, and won by five at `15-10, a nine-inning game that took a ridiculous 4 hours and 43 minutes to complete, two minutes less than the longest nine-inning game in major league history. It was a game in which 387 pitches were thrown by the two teams

Then on Sunday perhaps the most stunning story of the season was written by starting pitcher Jack Kartsonas. With the bullpen worn out as coach Steve Sabins used three relievers in the first game and eight in the second game, throwing 13 of the 18 innings in the two games, Kartsonas had given them a strong start.

He did, throwing 111 pitchers over 6 2/3 innings in earning his fifth win against one loss to go with a 2.19 ERA in a reclamation season that borders upon the unbelievable.

It was just Kartsonas’ third start of the season, a season few thought they’d ever see him pitch as his arm was pretty much being held together by the science of sports medicine.

“His story is remarkable,” Sabins said. “We recruited him knowing that he’d have to have multiple procedures on his throwing arm. He’s basically just been getting healthy throughout the entire spring.”

A graduate student out of Pittsburgh, the 6-foot-4, 220-pound right-hander looked far more solid than his arm had proved to be as he pitched first at John Carroll for a year, then three years at Kent State. He had to sit out the 2022 season after arm surgery and kept another date with the surgeon before beginning his career with the Mountaineers.

“He’s a competitor, an older guy who loves to pitch,” Sabins noted after he made his first start of the season on April 13 against Houston. “He basically got his opportunity by building his pitch count throughout the year and took advantage of it.”

Oh, did he take advantage of it. The Houston game saw him give up two hits in seven innings without a run and then follow that up giving up one hit and one unearned run in six innings against Cincinnati.

Sabins felt the Cincinnati start was “the best start anyone has given us all year”, but it was his next start that proved to be the most important start of the year because of the situation.

The ball was his and if he had to give it up early, chances well were that the conference winning streak would have ended and what is now the No. 16 nation in the ranking might have dropped significantly.

But it was going to take more than just nine guys with baseball bats in their hands to get him out of this game.

Kartsonas had to battle through everything UCF threw at him because Sabins didn’t have anything to throw back at them. He gave up a run in the first and second inning but hung in there until the Mountaineers could get a 3-2 lead, finally stepping aside for Ben McDougal, who closed it out with 2 1/3 innings of no-hit relief.

A new-found sinker in repertoire has given him a weapon where he doesn’t have to live off the power in his arm and it’s been a huge addition.

“I trust it,” he said after the Cincinnati game. “I started throwing it when I started throwing bullpens again after surgery. It just comes super naturally, I think, with my arm slot.”

But the motion may be natural but learning the pitch took a lot of work and the new technology, including Trackman, a visual aid that is used in golf and football in addition to baseball.

“All the resources we have here have been a big deal for me,” Kartsonas said. “Getting on Trackman and my first bullpen after surgery, kind of figuring out what works and what doesn’t work, that’s been huge for me.”

Now, WVU is in the stretch. They play at 6 o’clock against Marshall in Charleston on Wednesday, then have a difficult run to the wire with a last non-conference game against rival Pitt and then series against Texas Tech, Kansas State and Kansas in the Big 12.

Closing at home against Kansas will be huge, as the Jayhawks are second to WVU in the conference, the Mountaineers owning a 16-3 record while the Jayhawks are 15-6. WVU will play two fewer games than Kansas due to having two games wiped out by wildfires when they were playing at Oklahoma State earlier in the season.