Heartbreak for Texas Longhorns as Stanford Cardinal advance to College World Series

STANFORD, Calif. — Somewhere in the sky over Sunken Diamond on Monday night, Texas lost track of a baseball and its season.

A fly ball lost in the twilight allowed Stanford to score the walk-off run in a 7-6 victory in the decisive third game of its NCAA super regional series, advancing the Cardinal (44-18) to the College World Series for the third straight year.

“It was a hell of a season,” Longhorns centerfielder Eric Kennedy said.

After Texas (42-22) twice overcame a three-run deficit in front of an announced crowd of 2,995, the Longhorns and Cardinal entered the ninth inning locked in a 6-6 tie. Texas stranded a runner at first base in the inning’s top half. Stanford then put two runners on base with two outs in the bottom of the ninth.

On a 1-1 pitch from Lucas Gordon, Stanford's Drew Bowser swung away and skied the ball into the Texas outfield. With what appeared to be a routine out, what was going to be the first extra-inning game of Texas' season seemed to be a formality.

But neither Kennedy nor right fielder Dylan Campbell could track the ball. It eventually landed in front of Campbell as Stanford’s Alberto Rios raced home from second with the winning run. Officially, it was ruled that Bowser singled on the play.

When asked about that sequence in the postgame press conference, Texas coach David Pierce said that “it’s just a different setting here with LED lights that are just different. When the ball went up, I saw it and I think everybody lost it." His players all had similar explanations.

NCAA baseball super regionals: Matchups, schedule and results

“I saw it off the bat, and then DC and I looked at each other, we looked back up and we just couldn't see it,” Kennedy said. “It sucks. There's nothing you can really do about twilight sky. It's just an unfortunate way to go down and I don't know if there's much we could have done to avoid that.”

Explained Campbell: “It was just Mother Nature. Me and EK couldn’t see the ball of the bat. That was just very fortunate on their end that it happened like that. We’ve just got to move forward, I guess. There’s nothing we can do about it now, it’s over.”

Said second baseman Jack O'Dowd: “I'm pretty sure that I probably saw what everyone else saw. Solid off the bat and then about 10 feet into the air, (the) ball just disappears. Next time everyone saw it, it was on the ground.”

What made that season-ending play even more surprising was that it came at the expense of an outfield that had been a consistent strength for the Texas' defense. Campbell, Kennedy and left fielder Porter Brown had committed only two errors all season, and both Campbell and Kennedy made highlight-reel catches against Louisiana in the Coral Gables regional. Just one inning earlier, Campbell recorded his eighth assist when he threw out a runner at third base.

“It's unfortunate that our game ended like that,” Pierce said.

Texas fell into a quick hole as starting pitcher Tanner Witt — making his sixth start of the season since returning from Tommy John surgery last year — struggled to establish himself. He stranded two runners in scoring position during the first inning, and Stanford chased him from the game after its first three batters collected hits in the second.

One of those came from Bowser, who clubbed a two-run homer, his third home run of the super regional. He also got the best of Gordon, the ace of the Texas staff, on Saturday and reliever Travis Sthele on Sunday.

After falling behind by three runs in the second, Texas got to Stanford starter Nick Dugan in the fourth. With two outs, Texas singled twice and drew a walk. That set up O'Dowd, who pounded a bases-clearing double into right field to tie it 3-3.

Stanford retook the lead with its own three-run fourth. After stranding a runner in scoring position in each of the next three innings, Texas tied the game again when it plated three runs in the eighth inning.

What's next?

Stanford will meet top-seeded Wake Forest (52-10) in its opening game at the College World Series on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Texas enters the offseason. At one point this year, Texas was 4-7. But the Longhorns rebounded and won a share of the Big 12 championship and wound up just one win shy of their 39th CWS appearance. Like Stanford, Texas was attempting to book a trip to Omaha for a third straight year.

"It was such a fun season," O'Dowd said. "The way that we started, in some ways it was fun because it made for a really, really great story when we started to get it going. Once we got it going, we were all rolling together and it was great, we kept that going. When we hit bumps again, we just kept moving through it. It was great to see the team come together."

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Stanford defeats Texas in Game 3 to reach College World Series