Published: May 24, 2009 11:26 pm      

No better time

Pitching, hitting finally come together as Bearkats win third straight Southland Conference tournament title

Talk about everything coming together.

When Bearkat pitcher Ryan Tepera struck out Texas State’s Cody Gambill for the final out of Saturday’s Southland Conference championship game, Sam Houston State put the finishing touches on a conference tournament in which they finally had all the pieces finally fit into place.

This season, that wasn’t always the case.

Earlier in the season, the Bearkats’ offense was clicking on all cylinders after opening SLC play with wins in five of its first six games, sweeping Texas-Arlington and winning a series with Texas State in San Marcos. In the first two SLC series, Sam Houston averaged more than eight runs and 13 hits.

But then the starting pitching started to take its lumps and as a result, the Bearkats lost five of their next six conference games, getting swept at home by Texas-San Antonio and losing a series against Northwestern State.

At the midpoint of conference play, the Bearkats had started five pitchers with four of them having earned run averages of more than 8.00.

“We felt like we had real good ammunition out on the mound,” SHSU head coach Mark Johnson said late Saturday night. “We knew the guys were young, but we thought they were going to be good. I think in our first 18 wins, 14 of them we had to come from behind. We just gave up so many runs.”

After the starters found their groove and kept SHSU in games, the Bearkats seemed like a team that couldn’t be beaten. For a while they weren’t as they rattled off 10 straight victories.

With the season winding down toward the conference tournament, the offense started to lag while the pitchers maintained their solid performances.

“When the pitchers started going, we fell into a slump,” Johnson said. “We just could not get the bats going. So it was kind of peculiar in that regard.”

It’s not the typical way a team would prefer to enter the postseason, especially in a league where teams don’t often receive at-large bids to the NCAA regionals and have to rely on winning the tournament just to get in.

Then at a time when they desperately needed to, the Bearkats put everything together at the SLC tournament in Corpus Christi, culminating Saturday with an emphatic 7-1 victory over Texas State, a team that led the league in hitting and boasted one of the conference’s top pitching staffs.

The Bearkats’ pitching was impressive and their offense was explosive all tournament long.

Sam Houston State was consistent from top to bottom in the three previous tournament games leading up Saturday’s championship.

It was Sam Houston’s hitting and pitching performances against Texas State, a team that is expected to receive an at-large bid because of its 41 wins and key victories over Rice, Texas A&M and Baylor, that showed what kind of team the Bearkats can be when everything works cohesively.

Bearkats sophomore pitcher Matt Shelton followed up his performance against Texas-San Antonio in the second round, in which he struck out four, allowed no walks, no hits and no runs in 3 2/3 innings, with a brilliant effort Saturday. Shelton entered the game — on one day’s rest — in the top of the fourth inning and humbled the Bobcats’ lineup. Shelton struck out eight and walked none in 6 2/3 innings. Texas State wasn’t able to get a hit off Shelton until the eighth inning. Shelton was so dominant that when he left the game, even Texas State fans couldn’t help but stand and applaud.

“It was pretty frustrating,” Texas State third baseman Lance Loftin said. “When you go up against good pitching, it’s definitely hard to score as many runs. We’ve been hitting the ball well as a team. We’re an offensive team. When we have the bats going, it’s hard to stop. They just put a guy out there that had the stuff to stop us. It was extremely frustrating.”

It wasn’t just the pitching that shined. The Bearkats’ bats went to town and collected 14 hits on the day. Sophomore Braeden Riley, who broke the Sam Houston State record for most hits in a season Friday night against Southeastern Louisiana, had another stellar game, going 4-for-5 with two RBIs. Riley now leads the nation with 108 hits.

When the Bearkats can get going like they were in the tournament, there’s no telling how well they can do in the regionals.

“The guys came out ready to play,” Johnson said. “We improved as a team. I like it when we’re strong during the stretch run. I was disappointed we weren’t stronger in the stretch run, but we’re getting ready to play in the (NCAA) tournament, so I like them a lot now.”