The Belmont hot streak continued on Thursday as the Bruins picked up their 16th win in the last 21 games against A-Sun opponents with a 4-1 victory against Kennesaw State. On day one of the A-Sun Championship, Belmont’s offense platted 15 runs against top-seeded Stetson. In 10 of those 21 games, the Bruins’ offense registered at least eight runs to help Belmont to the six seed.
After platting 15 runs against Stetson in game one on seven extra-base hits – including three home runs – some would worry that Belmont wouldn’t be able to duplicate their run production again, but the Bruins front man Dave Jarvis didn’t want to waste the run production yesterday.
“There is an old saying about runs is that [runs] spoil so you can’t let them go to waste. You can’t keep them till the next day so you have to use them when you get them and then regenerate them again the next day and we were able to do that today.”
With Kennesaw State’s Bryan Blough (4-3, 3.51 ERA) on the bump for the Owls it looked as if the Belmont bats had gone stale early in the game as Blough retired the Bruins in order in each of the first three innings. Upon seeing Blough for a second time in the game, the Bruins started seeing success. Derek Hamblen singled leading off the fourth inning. After advancing to second a Dylan Craig sacrifice bunt, Nate Woods drove in Hamblen to give Belmont the game’s first run.
“Today we came in looking for a dogfight because we knew the kind of pitcher that Blough was and the great arm that he has so we knew we had to put things together against him to have an opportunity to score runs.”
More opportunities appeared in the sixth and eight innings to give the Bruins the 4-0 advantage and chase Blough from the game after 7.2 innings of work. With multi-hit performances coming from four different Belmont batters (Hamblen, Craig, Matt Zeblo and Jared Breen) the Bruins anxiously await their next opponent to see which batters will step up for BU again.
“This is as balanced of an offense that I have ever seen for us because we don’t have one kid that has off-the-chart average or off-the-chart power, but we have good balance throughout the lineup in on-base percentage, slugging percentage and RBI.”
Coach Jarvis and Belmont hope to continue their hot streak in the A-Sun Championship and that their two wins thus far don’t spoil and go to waste.
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