COLLEGE STATION, Texas – The Texas A&M-Corpus Christi baseball team came up short in its midweek contest against Texas A&M on Tuesday evening, jumping out to an early lead but ultimately falling by a run-rule final score of 17-7 in seven innings.
Staring down at the preseason No. 1 ranked team in the country, the Islanders made it a point to start as quickly as possible on Tuesday, getting on the board for a pair of runs in the opening frame. Their first rally of the game came all with two outs in the first, starting with back-to-back base knocks from seniors
Austin Russell and
Trey Cruz. This put traffic on the basepaths for senior
Isaac Webb, who managed to cash in with a double into the gap in right center to plate both and give A&M-Corpus Christi its first advantage of the day.
After this came a roller coaster ride, with the two squads combining to score 11 runs over the next two innings. The first of these outbursts came from the Aggies in the bottom of the first, as the hosts quickly responded with a six-run inning that flipped the game right on its head. The Islanders would throw their counterpunch immediately following this, though, answering back with five unanswered of their own to take the lead once again. Like in the first, four of these scores came with two outs in the second, starting with a Texas A&M error off the bat of senior
Cade Sanchez that brought in two. Senior
Austin Russell drove in Sanchez with a first-pitch liner up the middle one batter later, and right after that, the team got another Aggies error on a fly ball from Cruz that brought the game level once again. To cap off this stretch, senior
Logan Vaughan came up as the leadoff hitter in the third and ambushed the first pitch he saw for his second home run of the season, a solo shot that put the Islanders back up 7-6.
This lead would not hold, however, as Texas A&M began to flex its muscles at the plate in the form of 11 unanswered runs of its own. The first handful of these came right after the Islanders jumped ahead, with the Aggies bringing home three on a two-run home run and a sacrifice fly. This damage could have been even more, though, as on the latter, junior
Christian Smith-Johnson made arguably the best play of the college baseball season to date when he leaped over the wall in right and fell into the bullpen to rob Gavin Kash of what would've been a grand slam.
Smith-Johnson's play kept the floodgates from opening for a little bit, but the Aggies would break through again not long after, scoring four in the bottom of the fourth and then four more in the seventh to reach the run-rule threshold. While this was going on, the Islanders cooled off at the plate after their hot start, tallying just one hit over their final four times in the box and going down in order in each of their last three.
The best performer of the day with the sticks was Russell, who recorded three of the team's eight hits while driving in a run and scoring two. Webb led the team in RBIs with two, and he joined Russell in the hit column along with Cruz, Vaughan, Smith-Johnson and junior
Karson Krowka. On the mound, freshman
Alberto Santos IV put in the best shift out of the bullpen, tossing 2.2 innings of scoreless ball while allowing just one hit and striking out four.
The Islanders will now try to get back in the win column in their second game of the week on Wednesday, traveling to take on Prairie View A&M at 2 p.m.
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