Oregon @ Hawaii (Ducks win series 3-1)

[oregontrack]

6-0, top 3.

brett thomas pinch hits for mendenhall, rbi single.

[oregontrack]

8-0, top 3

alto hits one off the wall, again a duck just misses a home run. second two bagger of the inning for alto, drives in two more.

[oregontrack]

8-3, going to the 4th.

nice answer for the rainbows. 3 runs on 5 hits. we have our 3-4-5 hitters coming up.

[oregontrack]

9-3, top 4.

shaun chase hits an RBI triple, AGAIN off the wall and just missing going yard.

[oregontrack]

10-3, top 4.

garlick w/ a sac fly, chase easily tags up and scores from 3B.

[cordy02c]

12-4 ducks healy with a sac fly and chase hits a solo hr

[woundedknees]

This could be beautiful...

[cordy02c]

ducks win 12-6 take series 3-1. Alto had 5 hits

[Coastal Duck]

Can a brutha get a WOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

GO DUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[UOducksTK1]

Sweet start to the season!

[TheMaehlMan]

Great to hear that the offense came out in a big way. It's always nice to start the season with a bang, hopefully we don't get schooled too badly against Vandy...

[oregontrack]

final thoughts on the hawaii series:

like i said several pages ago, it's waaaaaay too early to really come to any conclusions about this team. we're 4 games into a 60+ game season. that said, some positives i hope continue to develop into trends:

altobelli had a really solid freshman year in 2010, hitting .275 w/ 33 rbis and played a big role in our trip to the postseason. last year, he took a step back, hitting .236. he really struggled. but his first four games of 2012: 10/21 (.476). he excelled in the lead-off spot, picking up seamlessly from where danny pulfer left off.

thomas walker started the first two games and had three errors in game two. fellow freshman scott heineman came in and hit 6/10 (.600) in games three and four, and played a flawless 3B. that's taking an opportunity and knocking it out of the park.

aaron jones was our first half mvp in 2011. he hit the freshman wall about midseason, but i was very confident he'd bounce back. after four games, he's hitting .421 in the 3-hole.

i think our lineup has a lot of potential. alto and payne should be legitimate table setters, and jones/healy/chase have a lot of potential in the middle of the order. chase went yard today for our second home run, he should only get better as the season goes on. garlick is a legit middle of the order hitter we have batting 6th, and as mentioned above, heineman has gotten off to a great start. that's seven deep.

i thought keudell was excellent, and we'll get more than four innings from him going forward. reed was excellent in his first ever start. it was hard to get a good read on tessar because we had such a huge lead, and he was pitching for contact. that's our weekend rotation: so far, so good. we'll see much better hitting teams as time goes on, but the bottom line is that a mediocre showing would have been bad news going forward. if you play a team that may not be god's gift to hitting, you better dominate them. and we did. BIG test next weekend.

bullpen did pretty well, i'd say. jimmy sherfy was possessed. that was incredible. i think he and joey housey can lock down the late innings, i really do. freshman thomas thorpe made three appearances and wasn't perfect, but he also didn't give up an earned run. on weeks where we don't play a midweek series jeff gold will likely join the 'pen.

the pac-12 is loaded, and we're not sure how good hawaii is yet (they did win the wac and went to a regional last year). but so far, so good. our 2010 team went 1-3 in hawaii. our 2011 team went 2-2. this year, we went 3-1. that's progress.

[thomas time]

Good job as a team to win the first series of the season.