CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – The Texas A&M-Corpus Christi baseball team concluded the 2025 regular season on a high note on Sunday afternoon, hanging on to take down New Orleans by a final score of 5-4 and secure a sweep of the final series of the year.
With the win, the Islanders (20-29, 12-18 SLC) officially locked up the No. 7 seed in the Southland Conference Baseball Championship after securing their spot in the tournament yesterday, moving even with the Privateers (25-24, 12-18 SLC) and earning the higher seed because of the head-to-head tiebreaker. They will now head into the Edinburg bracket for the first weekend of play, first taking on No. 2 UTRGV with No. 3 Lamar and No. 6 Houston Christian also matching up on the other side.
In similar fashion to Saturday's game, the Islanders found themselves trailing right out of the gates, falling in a 2-0 hole courtesy of a home run from Diego Villescas off of sophomore starter
David Dean as just the second batter of the game. As it turned out, though, this would be the only damage against Dean throughout the rest of his outing, as he settled in very nicely to finish 4.2 innings while allowing just those runs on three hits and one walk and striking out three. After the first inning, the lefty retired 11 of the 12 hitters that he faced, surrendering a lone leadoff single in the third but otherwise working spotless until he handed the ball to head coach
Scott Malone and made his departure.
"Dean got off to a rocky start, and it was a different vibe showing up to the park and feeling like we weren't fighting for our life," Malone said. "He got off on a bad step, but then he settled in and started putting zeroes up. It was tempo and strikes, and he kept them off balance and kept going at them."
Dean's effort combined with 1.2 scoreless innings in relief from junior
Nathan Darden kept A&M-Corpus Christi in the ballgame while its bats struggled out of the gates, getting held off the board completely through five against UNO starter Hayden O'Dell. The Islanders finally managed to break through at the plate in the sixth against the Privateers bullpen, however, pushing across three runs to take their first lead of the afternoon. Back-to-back singles by senior
Trey Cruz and junior
Karson Krowka followed by a hit-by-pitch of sophomore
Jarrett Flaggert loaded the bases quickly with no one out, and after a New Orleans pitching change, a wild pitch would bring Cruz in from third for the team's first score. In the same plate appearance, junior
Christian Smith-Johnson dumped a blooper into shallow center for a single that scored Krowka, and after one out, a sacrifice fly by senior
Drake Kerr proved just deep enough to score Flaggert and make it a 3-2 game.
The Privateers would go on to tie things back up in the top of the eighth, but the Islanders responded once again with two runs in the eighth on a run-scoring wild pitch and a sac fly off the bat of senior
Isaac Webb. This brought the hosts to within three outs of victory, and after surrendering one score and loading the bases to bring the go-ahead run into scoring position, sophomore
Matthew Molina came up big to end it, punching out No. 3 hitter Bryce Calloway to strand the runners and lock up the win. This went down as Molina's fourth save of the season and his second of the series, earning one on Friday as well after also retiring the midseason All-American Calloway with a fly ball to the warning track in center field.
On offense, A&M-Corpus Christi was led by Webb and senior
Logan Vaughan, with the former going 2-3 with a walk and an RBI out of the three-hole and the latter picking up knocks in both of his plate appearances after entering the game as a pinch hitter in the seventh. After Webb, the other RBIs belonged to Kerr and Smith-Johnson, and in the hit column, those four were joined by Cruz, Krowka and senior
Josh Blount. On the mound, the relief quartet of Darden, junior
Luke Singleton, senior
Cam Soliz and Molina was fantastic, working the final 4.1 innings while allowing just two earned runs on six hits while striking out four.
The Islanders will now take the next few days to prepare for the postseason before then heading south to Edinburg to square off with the Vaqueros on Thursday at 6 p.m. Their next game of the tournament will then take place on Friday, kicking off at 1 p.m. with a loss in their first contest and 6 p.m. if they win.
"UTRGV is doing business at another level right now, on the field and in the stadium with the crowds," Malone said. "It'll be a challenge for us, but our guys won't be scared. They're a really good team, so it'll take our A-game, and we're ready to go give it to them."
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