Husker baseball starts critical series at Minnesota with 12-5 win; Matthews suffers ‘freak accident’ | Baseball

The Nebraska baseball team got off to the start it needed Friday night in the first game of a critical series at Minnesota.

Garrett Anglim went 4-for-5, Max Anderson blasted a go-ahead, three-run home run in the fourth inning, and Koty Frank delivered a strong relief performance as the short-handed Huskers downed the last-place Gophers 12-5 at Siebert Field in Minneapolis.

“Just some really good at-bats up and down the lineup. A lot of loud outs, too,” NU coach Will Bolt said during his postgame radio show. “The balls we put in play, a lot of line drives to the gaps where they made some good play son us, hard-hit balls, just really good production up and down the lineup.”

The Huskers played without sophomore infielder Brice Matthews, who suffered an apparent knee injury during pregame warmups and had to be scratched from the lineup. Matthews had started 41 of NU’s 43 previous games this season.

“Just a freak accident. You just liken it to a non-contact injury in football where he just got his cleat stuck in the turf,” Bolt said. “Hopefully the swelling is not there tomorrow, and he’s feeling a little bit better.”

Part of a six-team logjam fighting for one of the final spots in the eight-team Big Ten Tournament at the end of the month, Nebraska can ill afford a loss this weekend against a Minnesota team that has won just two league games this season.

The victory pulled Nebraska percentage points ahead of Purdue for eighth place in the conference after the Boilermakers lost to Iowa on Friday night.

Trailing 4-2 through three innings, the Huskers got things going offensively.

A pair of two-out hits set the table for Anderson’s fourth-inning blast, which put NU ahead 6-4 after Anglim’s RBI single earlier in the frame. 

The Huskers added two more in the top of the fifth before Frank took over for starter Shay Schanaman in the bottom of the frame and promptly retired the first seven batters he faced on the way to improving to 4-0 this year.

Frank allowed just two hits while striking out four in 4 1/3 innings of relief.

“Couldn’t have worked out much better from the bullpen standpoint,” Bolt said. “We had some different guys moving early in the game, because we know we’ve got to stabilize the game; every inning is important.”

Nebraska finished with 14 hits as a team. Griffin Everitt went 3-for-6 with a two-run double in the ninth inning. Leighton Banjoff added two more hits while reaching base four times. Luke Sartori, a late addition to the lineup after Matthews’ injury, went 2-for-5 with a pair of runs scored.