Notre Dame baseball blasts Purdue in Irish home opener
It was cloudy and cool in South Bend on Tuesday, but Notre Dame’s bats remained red hot. Coming off a weekend sweep of Tennessee Tech in which the Irish put up 43 runs in three games, Notre Dame powered past Purdue 11-2 in the home opener at Frank Eck Stadium.
Batting out of the eight-hole, second baseman Estevan Moreno smashed 3 home runs in one game for the second time in the last week. He became the first Notre Dame player ever to have three games with 3 homers.
The Irish (9-2) are up to 32 home runs this season after going into Tuesday’s slate of games one behind Georgia for the nation’s lead. It took Notre Dame until mid-April to reach 30 homers in each of the last two seasons. The Irish got there Tuesday in the first week of March when Moreno sent his first of 3 home runs over the right field fence to give the home team a 1-0 lead in the third. He hit his second to center in the sixth and his third to left in the eighth to complete an impressive spray chart.
Purdue scored its only two runs of the night in the fifth to make it a 3-2 game at the time. Notre Dame reliever Radek Birkholz took over for starter Matt Bedford in the fourth and continued where his predecessor left off with a clean frame, but he ran into trouble in the fifth when he issued a walk to the leadoff man. It was a single and two more walks from there to load the bases.
Purdue’s Connor Caskenette made Birkholz pay with a two-run single, but Birkholz got out of further trouble with a strike out and a ground out.
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Notre Dame erupted for four runs in the sixth and three in the seventh to put the game out of reach. First baseman Connor Hincks, who was a home run shy of hitting for the cycle, had an RBI triple in the seventh to score DM Jefferson, who was on third himself after an RBI triple scored Jack Penney.
Notre Dame finished with 13 hits to Purdue’s 8. Right-handed relievers Bennett Flynn and Sammy Cooper combined to pitch four scoreless innings after Purdue’s fifth-inning rally to get the Irish into the house with their first home win of the season. Bedford earned his first win of the season with three scoreless innings with just 2 hits and 2 walks.
Notre Dame begins conference play as one of the hottest hitting teams in the nation with a road trip to Blacksburg, Va., to take on Virginia Tech (8-3). The three-game series starts on Friday at 4 p.m. ET. Saturday’s game is also at 4, and Sunday’s series finale is at 1.
