Down 5-3 on the road in the top of the 9th inning, to a strong Washington Huskies club that also qualified for the NCAA post-season, Stanford’s Will Matthiessen had a Roy Hobbs moment. In a season that has been full of late game heroics for Matthiessen and seemingly the entire Cardinal roster, the 6’6” sophomore from West Linn, Oregon jacked a 1-1 fastball deep out of left-center field on a frozen rope to tie the game 5-5. Matthiessen’s home-run was such a no-doubt-dinger, that the television play-by-play announcer perfectly analyzed it off the bat, simply saying “Uh-oh.”
The monster two-run shot was not like ‘The Natural’ in a walk-off sense, but it did shift #2 Stanford’s (44-10 / 21-8 PAC-12) momentum in a brilliant and eventually victorious way.