OMAHA — For the ninth straight year, there will be no national championship for the top-seeded team at the College World Series.
The pitching tandem of Danny Sandbrink and Erik Davis, plus a Stanford offense that produced timely hits, were too much Wednesday night for a Miami club that played nowhere near midseason form late in the year.
The Cardinal dispatched the Hurricanes with an 8-3 victory and now gets a day off. Next, Stanford will try to beat Georgia twice to win Bracket 1 and reach the best-of-three championship round for the first time since 2003.
Niwot High School graduate Sean Ratliff’s homer and Cord Phelps’ triple in a four-run fifth inning were the key blows for the Cardinal (41-23-2). But it was the steady efforts of Sandbrink, a freshman making his sixth start, and Davis, a down-on-his-luck senior, that kept Miami from scoring more than one run in any inning.
“We knew they were going to score some runs,” Davis said, “but if we could keep them out of the big inning, we were able to keep momentum on our side.”
The Hurricanes (53-11) failed to join the 1999 squad as the only No. 1 national seeds to win the College World Series.
Miami, ranked No. 1 for most of the second half of the season, has been eliminated in three games in each of its four CWS appearances since 2003.
The Hurricanes lost 7-4 to Georgia in their Omaha opener. They bounced back to beat rival Florida State 7-5, but closer Carlos Gutierrez was shaky for the second consecutive game.
