ST. LOUIS—First on the docket for the Illinois Institute of Technology baseball team was No. 4 Washington University (Mo.) in a Saturday-afternoon road bout in St. Louis. The Bears never trailed in a 13-3 (8 Innings) victory over the Scarlet Hawks. 

Illinois Tech opens the season with an 0-1 record while the Bears stay undefeated at 4-0.

The Bears set the tone with a first-inning run before Nick Bledsoe scored off Orlando Cardenas-Juan's single in the second inning for Illinois Tech, which tied the game 1-1. A pair of four-run innings for WashU in the second and sixth was too much for IIT to overcome. The Scarlet Hawks scored their final runs of the contest in the third inning, where Zachary Dickey drove in Michael Courtney (walked) off a sacrifice fly to right field followed by Connor Blake's RBI groundout that plated Brandon Bennitt (doubled). 

Courtney, Bennitt, Bledsoe, Cardenas-Juan and John Politis each tallied a hit for an IIT team that accumulated five for the contest. The Bears pounded 12 hits in the contest, led by Caleb Durbin's 3-for-4 outing. 

Ryan Cantlin, Wyatt Ronek, Jacob Geiger and Joe Fulkerson all saw time on the pitching rubber for Illinois Tech and combined to give up 12 hits and 13 runs. Matt Ashbaugh improved to 2-0 on the rubber for WashU as he struck out eight Scarlet Hawks, and gave up five hits and three runs over six innings.

IIT and WashU will square off in a doubleheader scheduled for tomorrow, Sunday, March 1 at 10:00 a.m.