NORMAL, Ill. – Missouri State’s final Missouri Valley Conference season ended Saturday evening in the first championship game of the league tournament at Duffy Bass Field.
After a 4-1 victory over UIC earlier in the day, the Bears fell to top-seeded Murray State by a 10-5 score in the title game. The Bears, who shared the regular season championship with the Racers, finish the year at 30-25.
Jason Schaaf, Curry Sutherland and Caden Bogenpohl earned all-tournament honors.
Missouri State will join Conference USA on July 1, 2025.
UIC Recap (Won, 4-1)
Curry Sutherland fired 6.2 innings of one-hit, shutout relief to lead the Bears to a 4-1 victory.
Sutherland (1-0) struck out three and retired the last 11 Flames he faced in relief of Max Knight, and the Bears played stellar defense behind him to advance to the championship game.
Caden Bogenpohl led off the game with a home run for the sixth time in his career and Dylan Robertson scored on Zack Stewart’s sacrifice fly the next inning for a 2-0 lead.
The Flames (22-33) used two singles and two walks to push a run across in the third, at which point Sutherland entered and got a double-play ball on his first pitch, with Robertson turning a nice 5-3 DP to end the inning.
The game was scoreless until the eighth, when Carter Bergman (10th) and Jake McCutcheon (15th) hit solo homers for the 4-1 final.
Nick Rodriguez saw his 40-game hitting streak end in a tie for 12th-longest in NCAA Division I history.
Murray State Recap (Lost, 10-5)
Murray State jumped out to a 4-0 lead and never looked back in the 10-5 victory.
The Racers (39-13) led after two batters thanks to a leadoff single and RBI triple from tournament MVP Dustin Mercer, then got a three-run double with two outs from Mercer in the second inning for a 4-0 lead.
Logan Dunn hit his first career homer in the third and Tyler Epstein had an RBI single in the fourth, but the Racers countered with solo homers in the bottom half of each frame to make it 6-2.
Bergman hit a two-run homer in the sixth, his third in as many games, but Murray State countered with four in the sixth to put the game away at 10-4.
Robertson’s sac fly in the seventh accounted for the game’s final run.
