Twenty-four hours after their bullpen handed Stanford a win in the eighth inning, the Clemson Tigers baseball team came back to Sunken Diamond and put 18 hits on the Cardinal in a 12-5 rout Sunday afternoon. Same field. Different game.
The Tigers (21-12, 4-8 ACC) trailed for most of the first five innings in their weekend series at Stanford and still won by seven. Six doubles, two homers, and a five-run sixth inning that broke the game open against a Stanford pitching staff that needed eight arms to get through nine innings.
Eight.
Teddy Tokheim got Stanford (14-15, 4-8 ACC) on the board first with a 382-foot solo shot in the opening inning, his 10th homer of the season. An unearned run on a passed ball in the third made it 2-0. Clemson starter Drew Titsworth lasted three innings, giving up four hits and three earned runs before Brendon Bennett came on in the fourth.
Jack Crighton woke the lineup up. His first home run of the season, 381 feet to deep left off Nick Dugan, cut the deficit to 2-1 in the fourth. Jason Fultz Jr singled home the tying run two batters later. Crighton finished 3-for-6 with three runs scored. He’d been quiet at the plate for weeks. Not Sunday.
The game went back and forth for two full innings. Eric Jeon launched a 422-foot bomb to center in the bottom of the fourth, and Ethan Hott added a sac fly to push Stanford ahead 4-2. Bryce Clavon answered in the fifth with a 410-foot homer of his own, his third of the year. Nate Savoie singled home the tying run. Stanford retook the lead in the bottom half on a Cort MacDonald RBI double to right center. After five innings, Stanford led 5-4 and neither side could pull away.
Then the sixth happened.
Clemson sent nine hitters to the plate. Fultz Jr walked. Moore singled him to second. Clavon singled to left, and when MacDonald bobbled it in left field, two runs scored on the play. Crighton singled home another. Gaffney doubled to left for a fourth. Savoie grounded out to short and scored a fifth. A 5-4 deficit turned into 9-5 in one inning, and you could see Stanford’s dugout deflate.
Stanford used eight pitchers Sunday. Kassius Thomas threw one pitch. One. Andrew Shaw lasted a third of an inning. Mike Erspamer came on in the sixth and gave up four earned runs without recording an out, and the parade to the mound never stopped.
Clemson wasn’t done. Three consecutive RBI doubles in the eighth. Savoie ripped one down the right field line to score Crighton. Jarrell doubled to right center to score Savoie. Lichtenberger, same thing, left field line. 12-5. That ended it.
But the real story walked off the mound, not out of the batter’s box.
After Saturday’s collapse and a 15-4 mercy-rule loss to Wake Forest earlier in the week, questions about the Clemson bullpen were fair. Dylan Harrison answered them. He came on in the fifth and threw 2.1 scoreless innings on 32 pitches, retiring eight of the nine hitters he faced. Danny Nelson followed and punched out five in two innings, his slider biting all afternoon. Combined: 4.1 innings, three hits, zero runs, seven strikeouts. Harrison picked up the win to move to 2-1.
Stanford’s lineup went 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position. Zero. Every Cardinal run came from solo homers, a sacrifice fly, or a passed ball. Tokheim and Jeon hit long balls, but when Stanford needed a hit with a runner on second or third, it didn’t come. Not once.
Clemson out-hit Stanford 18-8 and played clean defense with zero errors. Stanford committed three, and MacDonald’s sixth-inning misplay was the one that cracked the game open.
The Tigers went 7-for-23 with RISP and left 10 on base, so this wasn’t a perfect offensive day. They left runners. Eleven strikeouts. But 18 hits covers a lot of flaws, and the bullpen doing its job for four-plus innings covered the rest.
Attendance was 1,383 at Sunken Diamond. Game time was 3 hours, 45 minutes. Temperature was 81 degrees.
The Tigers conclude their five-game road trip with a game at Santa Clara on Monday at 9 p.m. EDT on ESPN+.
