It took a power outage to flip the switch off on the Shockers (30-22), but it wasn’t enough to overcome the Kansas Jayhawks Tuesday night.

The Jayhawks (31-18) held off a Wichita State Shockers rally to hold onto the 7-5 victory and sweep the season series.

Jayhawks starting pitcher Tanner Poppe earned the win, going five innings and striking out five batters.

It was a bizarre turn of events as the Eck Stadium lights cut off during the seventh inning with KU runners at first and second base. At that point, all the players could do was socialize on a pitch-black field.

The incident caused a 20-minute delay. Because of it, about half of the season-high crowd of 4,320 decided that they’d seen enough and left the game.

According to WSU associate athletic director Brad Pittman, a main break tripped and caused the stadium lights to go out.

The Shockers have lost six consecutive Tuesday night games, as well as five consecutive games against Big 12 opponents.

“It’s a little frustrating, because we’re close to being all right; we’re close to being pretty good,” said Shockers coach Gene Stephenson.

“Gardner threw about as well as he can. He stayed ahead of hitters as much as he possibly could. I was really encouraged with (Tobin) Mateychick. I think he’s ready to help us now,” he said.

The Jayhawks’ five run fifth inning blew the game open. Justin Protacio and Kevin Kuntz both had one out base hits. Michael Suiter singled past a diving Erik Harbutz and Protacio scored, tying the game 2-2.

WSU had a chance to leave the inning with the tie, but Tyler Baker committed an error attempting to throw out Kuntz at third base from his knees. Kuntz scored, giving the Jayhawks a 3-2 lead. The floodgates opened when Connor McKay hit a three-run triple for a 6-2 lead.

“That one inning is what killed us,” Stephenson said. “You can’t have those this weekend. I wish we had that one inning back.”

Now Stephenson is getting ready for an upcoming weekend series with Creighton. As deflating as this loss appears to be, WSU can still hold onto first place in The Valley with a good series against the Bluejays.

“If I had a choice between winning this one and losing this weekend, I would sure pick losing this one over losing this upcoming weekend,” Stephenson said.