CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – The Texas A&M-Corpus Christi baseball team could not extend its hot streak into its series-opening contest against Southeastern on Friday evening, fading late in the game and getting taken down by a final score of 11-3.
The loss snapped what had been a stretch of three straight wins and four in their last five games for the Islanders (13-22, 5-11 SLC), who entered play coming off a conference sweep of Stephen F. Austin last weekend. It also kept them from starting a different streak against the Lions (27-7, 12-4 SLC), as they had previously won the last meeting between the two back on May 17 of last year in Hammond.
In a matchup featuring two Preseason All-Southland First Team starters in senior
Zach Garcia and Southeastern's Brennan Stuprich, it was the offenses for both teams that set the tone out of the gates. The Lions were first up in the opening frame, jumping on Garcia with back-to-back solo home runs by Ryan Brome and TJ Salvaggio to put the visitors up two just three batters into the evening. The Islanders answered back right away, though, tagging Stuprich for a pair of RBI singles from seniors
Trey Cruz and
Isaac Webb that leveled the score back up at two apiece after just one inning.
The two aces settled in after this, as both Garcia and Stuprich went on to trade zeroes in each of the next three frames. It wasn't until the fifth that the next big rally would come for either team, with Garcia being the unfortunate victim of another SLU flurry that was exacerbated by a couple of Islander errors. The Lions would score three runs in the inning, getting the first ones on two separate run-scoring doubles and last on an unearned run driven home with an RBI groundout.
This would be the first of three different three-run innings for Southeastern over the last half of the game, getting its second just one frame later to chase Garcia and another to close things out in the ninth. On the other side, the Islanders did not have the same breakthrough against Stuprich, who finished 7.2 innings in his outing before turning things over to the bullpen to secure the final four outs. After the first, the team managed to hang just one more run on the board, scoring on an RBI double play from Cruz in the sixth before then going down quietly the rest of the way.
When it was all said and done, A&M-Corpus Christi tallied just five total hits on the game, a far cry from the 17 per game that they averaged last weekend in Nacogdoches. The knocks came from five different players with one each, those being Cruz, Webb, seniors
Austin Russell and
Cade Sanchez and sophomore
Jarrett Flaggert. Cruz and Webb also accounted for all three of the team's RBIs, with Cruz leading the way with two and Webb picking up the other one. On the mound, sophomore
Matthew Molina had his best outing of the season, working 3.1 innings in relief of Garcia while setting the Islanders single-game high in strikeouts this year with eight.
The Islanders will now try to get back on track in the second game of the series against the Lions on Saturday, returning to action for first pitch at 6 p.m.
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