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 Well done, Young Stanford pitcher goes distance, foils Fullerton 9-2
Posted: Sunday June 13, 1999 12:22 AM OMAHA, Neb. (AP) -- The wind was blowing out to right field and Josh Hochgesang, Edmund Muth and Joe Borchard had no trouble finding the flow. Each homered to right and right-hander Jason Young went the distance for his 10th complete game as Stanford beat Cal State-Fullerton 9-2 Saturday night in the College World Series. "That's how it's been all year long," Muth said. "When we need to hit, we hit. When we need to pitch, we pitch." Sixth-seeded Stanford (49-13) will play Monday against second-seeded Florida State, which beat Texas A&M 7-3 in Saturday's early game. Third-seeded Fullerton (49-13) goes against No. 7 seed Texas A&M on Monday in an elimination game. Hochgesang, who grew up near the Fullerton campus, gave the Cardinal a 3-0 lead in the top of the third when he hit a breaking pitch into the stands, pumping his fist when he rounded first and saw the ball drop. "It will be nice for my family back home," Hochgesang said. "I just wanted to go up and put some solid contact on the ball. Any home run at the College World Series is nice." Muth hit the first pitch of the fourth into the right-field stands to make it 4-0. Borchard went deep in the fifth for the third homer off Adam Johnson (10-4), this time with a shot that cleared the bleachers. "There really isn't too much to that home run," Borchard said. "I assume he made a mistake because he hung a curveball. I was able to take advantage of that mistake and it went out the park." Young (12-3), meanwhile, held the Titans to one hit through four innings, throwing well until Shawn Norris got a leadoff triple in the fifth and Craig Patterson followed with a homer to left to pull Fullerton within 5-2. "There was nothing I could do about that," Young said. "From there, I started to pitch a little more. I started to settle in. I just realized my mistakes on those two pitches and bounced back." Young struck out the next three as he retired nine in a row. He improved as the game progressed. "I started to find my changeup around the fifth inning," Young said. "That really became an out pitch for me. I got a lot of groundouts. I can't say enough about our defense in the last two weeks." After Young struck out Ryan Owens for the first out of the ninth, Norris reached on an error and Ryan Moore hit a pinch-hit double to right-center. Young struck out Robert Guzman and got David Bacani to ground out to second for the first complete game in the CWS in two years. "Young was tough," Titans coach George Horton said. "He was in the strike zone when we weren't swinging and he wasn't in the strike zone when we were. That's called good pitching." Young struck out eight, walked two and hit three batters while allowing six hits. Johnson started for Fullerton, throwing into the sixth and allowing seven runs and 10 hits. He turned it over to Marco Hanlon with runners on first and second, and that's when Stanford put it out of reach. Hanlon missed first baseman Chris Beck on his first pickoff try, helping the Cardinal score two more runs. "Marco wasn't going to throw that," Horton said. "He was trying to hold on to it." Twice more in the seventh, Hanlon overthrew his pickoff targets. In 1 1/3 innings, Hanlon committed three of Fullerton's five errors.
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