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Huskers hold on to sweep Purdue

Shortstop Steven Reveles led the Husker offensive attack with two hits and three RBI, including a solo-home run in the eighth inning and a two-run double in the fourth.
Shortstop Steven Reveles led the Husker offensive attack with two hits and three RBI, including a solo-home run in the eighth inning and a two-run double in the fourth.

It wasn't pretty, but the Nebraska Baseball team held on to beat Purdue on Sunday 9-8 to earn a sweep in their first Big Ten Conference series of the season.

The Huskers jumped up by a score of 8-1 in the fifth inning, and were able to get out of eighth and ninth inning jams to hold off the pesky Boilermakers.

"We just didn't play a full game," NU head coach Darin Erstad said on his post game radio show on the Husker Sports Network. "Again, we had a couple of times this year where we had some momentum and we didn't throw strikes. Today it was just sloppy baseball. That's not the expectation we have.

"It was spotty today. Yeah we are swinging the bats well, but we have to take care of the baseball defensively and we gave them way too many free passes. We gave them some momentum. We have to clean that up."

The win capped of a perfect 5-0 road trip through the state of Indiana for the Huskers this week, as NU improved their record to 16-7 and 3-0 overall in Big Ten Conference play. Since starting the season 3-6, The Big Red have now won 13 out of their last 14 games.

"You have to find a way and we found a way," Erstad said. "It was ugly, it wasn't pretty.

"It's hard to sweep on the road. I don't care where you are at or who you are playing. It's very difficult, so we'll take it, but there's a lot of things we need to clean up."

Nebraska scored 9 runs on Sunday off 16 hits, but those numbers were off set by four errors in the field.

Freshman pitcher Matt Waldron got the win going 5.2 innings. Shortstop Steven Reveles led the Husker offensive attack with two hits and three RBI, including a solo-home run in the eighth inning and a two-run double in the fourth.

Senior third baseman Jake Placzek also started the game on Sunday in the first inning with a two-run home run and finished the day with three hits.

NU will come back home this week when they take on Creighton and they'll host Illinois in Big Ten play over the weekend.

"The fans get into (playing Creighton), I get that," Erstad said. "I could care less who we are playing. We need to play better baseball. I don't care who we are playing. I have all the respect in the world for Creighton, but right now we have our own issues to deal with."

-Sean Callahan

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