​​Despite an evening full of rain clouds and passing drizzles, Marshall Baseball  was all smiles after walking off the West Virginia University Mountaineers 3-2 after 11 innings on Wednesday, April 10.

“I kind of blacked out for a second, but, anytime you get a walk-off, anytime we beat West Virginia, it’s a lot of fun,” Caden Kaiser said about his reaction to his walk-off single. “Somehow my shirt came off, somehow I had water dumped on me, but it was all worth it.”

In the bottom of the 11th inning the Herd had two outs and two runners on base, Jack Firestone on third and Calin Smith on second. With Kaiser up to bat and the count even at 2-2, the ball was thrown and, with the crack of the bat, Kaiser sent the ball back up the middle to bring in Firestone to score the game-winning run.

“I was trying to hit a fastball, and I caught a hanging changeup out front and got it up the middle,” Kaiser said.

The 11th inning was not the only heart-pounding inning of the game, though. In the bottom of the 9th, the Herd trailed the Mountaineers 1-2. On a WVU error, Cam Harthan scored from second to tie the game and allow extra innings.

The Herd trailed the Mountaineers for the first six innings of the game. In the bottom of the sixth, Marshall found its groove with a Tre Hondras double bringing in Elijah Vogelsong for the first Herd run of the contest.

The series of events that set up the Kaiser walk-off were equally as impressive. In the top of the 11th, Nicholas Weyrich executed a pick-off that resulted in a 1-4-5-3 double play to zap any momentum the Mountaineers had.

“An all-out, team victory right there,” head coach Greg Beals said. “That’s what I told the guys. It was everybody. Everybody had a little piece in it. I thought we pitched the ball extremely well today.” 

“We executed on a team that had given us fits offensively in the first two games; we executed our pitching very well; we executed our team defense. The pickoff play was huge in the baseball game. Caden Kaiser gets the big hit, the game-winner. I’m happy for our guys,” Beals said.

The Herd heads on the road Friday, April 12, to take on the No. 19 Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns in a three-game series in Lafayette, Louisiana.