Wichita State baseball coach Gene Stephenson knew Sunday’s game against Pittsburgh—its third and final game of the series—would be the biggest challenge the Shockers faced yet. But WSU’s reaction was sub-par, and No. 32 WSU fell to Pittsburgh 11-3, giving Pittsburgh its third straight win of the weekend.

“I told our guys before the game, ‘The measure of each of us, the measure of each man, is how you react to adversity,’ and we’ve had adversity because we didn’t play very well or pitch well the last two days,” Stephenson said. “This was an opportunity for us to see what we’re made of, to see what we can do.” 

Stephenson planned on starting Kris Gardner on the mound, but illness left Tobin Mateychick to an unplanned start instead. Pittsburgh scored six runs on two hits in Mateychick’s 34 pitches, including a grand slam over the center-field fence; Drew Palmer relieved Mateychick before the end of the first inning. 

“Unfortunately the tone was set so quickly, in a negative way, in the top of the first that we get in the hole six to nothing right off the top before we had the chance to do anything—that’s not responding very well to adversity,” Stephenson said.

Palmer pitched five full innings for the Shockers, allowing six hits and only two runs, while throwing only 19 more pitches than Mateychick’s partial first inning. 

Pitching was a factor for WSU’s troubles all weekend. The Shockers allowed 14, 17 and 14 hits in each respective game, for a total of 45 hits to WSU’s 26. 

But WSU’s offensive performance hurt the Shockers on Sunday as well. WSU finally got a hit in the third inning, after getting out of the first two innings in three batters. The offense went three up, three down in the next three innings, and finally Garrett Bayliff singled to right field in the seventh, allowing Casey Gillaspie and Johnny Coy to score. The Shockers scored one more in the ninth inning with two Pittsburgh errors, but it was not enough to relieve Pittsburgh’s 11-3 lead. 

“I felt like in practices that this team was really going to be good, but practices mean nothing, it’s what you do and perform in the heat of battle in the game, and we didn’t respond at all well,” Stephenson said. “Our offense was not good, and (Pittsburgh’s) starting pitching gave them seven plus innings in each outing. Wouldn’t that have been nice if we had that same kind of situation?”

Pittsburgh coach Joe Jordano doesn’t only attribute the result of the series to WSU’s mistakes, but the Panthers’ nearly perfect execution. The pitching staff threw 24 less pitches than WSU on Sunday, while the offense hit .368 to WSU’s .152.

“We had a couple of errors in that last inning, but for the most part this weekend we played error free. We had a lot of big hits, our pitching was very solid, not only from the starting pitching to the bullpen, we ran the bases well, and got some timely hitting,” Jordano said. “Overall, as I said from our perspective, I thought it was more about what we did rather than what Wichita State didn’t do.”

Pittsburgh’s sweep of WSU is the first three-game series at home that Stephenson has been swept in his 36 years at WSU. 

“We’re in a world of hurt at this point, because we’re not pitching well, we’re not hitting well,” Stephenson said. “For a team to come in here from the north and sweep us for the first time in history is not only remarkable and speaks volumes about them, but it also speaks a lot about us which was not good.”