SACRAMENTO, Calif. — For the first time since 2014, the Sacramento State baseball team has clinched at least a share of the Western Athletic Conference regular season title as the Hornets banged out 13 hits and senior right-hander Evan Gibbons picked up his ninth win of the year following a 13-5 victory over Utah Tech on Thursday night at John Smith Field.

With the victory — and losses by both Grand Canyon and Abilene Christian — Sacramento State locked up the top seed for next week's WAC Tournament in Mesa, Ariz., and opens play on Thursday (May 22) against an opponent to be determined at 12:30 p.m. PT. 

The share of this season's regular season crown is the Hornets' third after they split the 2012 title with New Mexico State and Nevada and won the championship outright in 2014. A Sacramento State win on Friday against the Trailblazers would give the Hornets the title outright for the second time in program history.

Entering the week leading the WAC in victories, Gibbons (9-2) allowed just one earned run on seven hits, walking one and striking out four over six innings of work for his seventh "quality start" of the season. His nine wins are the most in a single-season by a Sacramento State pitcher since Austin Root finished 11-3 in 2018, while his 20 career wins rank tied for ninth on the school's all-time list alongside Dick Bach (1959-62). 

Noah Lucchesi, Andrew Monson, and Colin Hunter then combined to pitch the final three innings to nail down the victory, with Lucchesi logging three strikeouts on the night.

That quartet was backed by an offense that scored in each of the final six innings, knocking out double-digit hits for the third straight contest and double-digit runs for the second time in its last three games.

After a solo home run in the third staked Utah Tech to the early lead, the Hornets answered with a shot of their own as JP Smith followed singles by Michael Perazzo and Luis Pimentel-Guerrero with his 11th home run of the year to right center, giving Sacramento State a 3-1 advantage it would not relinquish.

The Hornets then put up four runs in the fourth on a Jacob Cortez RBI single and a pair of Trailblazer errors that led to three runs and a 7-1 advantage. Utah Tech clawed a run back in the fifth, but Ryan Christiansen slammed a one-out home run in the fifth — his seventh of the season, Jakob Poturnak added a two-run single in the sixth, and Matt Masciangelo drove home a run with a ground ball for the 11-2 lead.

Utah Tech scratched across three in the eighth to make it a six-run game, but Elie Kligman plated a run in the home half with a sacrifice fly and Perazzo added another with an RBI single to cap the scoring.

Every Sacramento State starter finished with at least one hit on the night while Smith, Christiansen, Cameron Sewell, and Perazzo all finished with multi-hit games. Both Christiansen and Perazzo scored three runs, driven home by seven different Hornets with RBIs.

Thanks to a sixth-inning single by Poturnak and a seventh-inning double by Tyler White, both extended their respective hitting streaks to nine consecutive games.

Game two of the series is scheduled for 4 p.m. PT at John Smith Field.