GRANVILLE — Randy Mazey doesn’t hide the fact that Dayne Leonard is playing hurt.
“He’s probably facing some sort of surgery once the season is over,” the WVU head coach said. “He’s playing all banged up all the time, but he doesn’t care.”
That was evident Sunday, as the WVU third baseman smacked a bases-loaded double that somehow stayed just inside of first base that handed the Mountaineers an 8-6 comeback victory against No. 20 Texas at Mon County Ballpark.
In postgame interviews, Leonard showed a slight side of his pain. His right hand is bandaged up like a mummy. His left forearm is padded, yet the junior who transferred in from Virginia Tech this season, still had himself a weekend.
He hit a two-run home run Saturday that provided the only two runs WVU scored in getting swept by the Longhorns (34-17, 11-10 Big 12) in a doubleheader.
A day later, Leonard, a former hockey player from Wisconsin while growing up as a kid, was 2 for 3 with four RBIs that helped the Mountaineers (28-18, 10-8) salvage the final game of the series and hand WVU it’s seventh win against a Top 25 team this season.
“To be honest, I just try to simplify it and see the ball and hit the ball,” Leonard said of his bases-clearing double. “To be honest, I think I kind of blacked out. I was just trying to put one in play. That was my goal.”
Up until Leonard’s moment, the outlook for WVU was teetering toward bleak.
The Mountaineers had been outscored 16-2 in the doubleheader loss and faced a 3-0 deficit Sunday in the first inning.
“When they throw up three in the first inning, an average team or a team without leadership would just roll over right there and go, ‘Well here we go again,’ ” Mazey said. “We kept scratching and clawing. There were a ton of heroes today in gold jerseys.”
That included WVU’s bullpen.
Chase Smith came in relief in the first inning, after starter Zach Bravo took a hard liner off his throwing hand.
He and Trey Braithwaite allowed just two earned runs over the next eight innings and Noah Short closed out the ninth after calling in sick earlier in the day.
“When we got here to the field today, Noah wasn’t even here,” Mazey told the story. “He called in and said he didn’t think he could make it. We had some medicine sent to him and let him sleep. I looked up, and he was here. I didn’t even know he was here.”
The bottom third of West Virginia’s lineup drove in all eight runs and produced six of the Mountaineers’ 11 hits.
Which sets up Leonard’s accomplishment quite nicely.
With WVU trailing 5-4 in the sixth, McGwire Holbrook singled, Braden Barry was hit by a pitch and Ben Abernathy loaded the bases while beating out a bunt for a hit.
Needing a spark that had not come all weekend, Leonard was down to his final strike before lacing a ground ball down the first base line that just inched past Ivan Melendez’s glove.
“It’s a good thing this field is 90 degrees instead of 89 degrees, because that would have been a foul ball,” Mazey said. “That couldn’t have come at a better time.”
All three runners scored, giving WVU a 7-5 lead it would not give back. The Mountaineers added another run in the eighth when Leonard’s single scored Abernathy, who led off the inning with a double.
“Just our team as a whole, we’re resilient,” Leonard said. “We don’t like to lose, especially like we did (Saturday) and against a team like Texas. It kind of fired us up. We got down three early. It was a gut-check, but it kind of showed that we don’t give up. That’s who we are.”
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