By Patrick McCormack
St. John’s University and its bats remained red hot.
The Johnnies clobbered visiting Georgetown 15-5 to complete a three-game weekend sweep in Big East baseball Sunday afternoon.
The Red Storm, which has won seven straight games and 10 out of their last 11, improved to 19-1 at Jack Kaiser Stadium with the victory. St. John’s Coach Ed Blankmeyer sees things starting to come together for his team during their winning streak.
“Once you get a comfort level and guys know where they are batting and know what they expected to do, I think they get a little more comfortable,” he said.
The Johnnies were led by their offense, which had 22 hits Sunday and got solid starting pitching from Chris Kalica. He gave up three runs on five hits and struck out seven in 6 1/3 innings to improve to 6-1 in the season.
St. John’s’ offense was led by first baseman Matt Harris. He had seven RBIs in the weekend, including a career-high four RBIs in Saturday’s 12-4 victory. Harris, who had two RBIs Sunday, has a simple but effective approach when he is at the plate with runners on base.
“When there are people on base, I try to hit the ball hard and put it in play,” he said. “Hopefully, I can end up scoring some runs.”
Second baseman Robert Wayman added three RBIs for the Johnnies Sunday. He drove in what turned out to be the winning run when he hit a two-RBI single in the second inning to make it 7-0. Robbie Knightes also had three RBIs, adding to the Red Storm offense with an RBI double in the first and a two-run triple in the third that made the score 10-1.
St. John’s scored 34 total runs in the three games against the Hoyas.
“We swung the bats very well today,” Blankmeyer said Sunday. “We jumped them and it certainly paid dividends for us. Over 20 hits in a college baseball game — that is swinging the bat pretty well.”
The strong performance against Georgetown gives St. John’s momentum heading into the Big East series against first-place Creighton and Xavier, with which the Red Storm is tied with for second place. Blankmeyer said his team needs to take things a game at a time, and if they play well and rack up victories, they can achieve their goal of winning the conference.
“Our goal is to play good baseball every weekend,” Blankmeyer said. “When we play in conference, we want to win our series. If we continue to do those things, we will get to the tournament and we would like to win the tournament.”
