CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – The Texas A&M-Corpus Christi baseball team secured its first Southland Conference win of the season on Friday evening, taking an early lead and riding some excellent pitching the rest of the way to down Lamar in the first game of their series by a final score of 6-1.
Continuing a trend from their most recent conference series against Northwestern State last weekend, the Islanders (11-10, 1-5 SLC) blitzed the Cardinals (12-10, 6-4 SLC) out of the gates in the opener, putting together a four-run first inning to take a commanding early lead over the current leaders in the Southland. The rally started fast when junior
Isaiah Afework and graduate
Cade Sanchez reached on a walk and a single respectively, and after both advanced into scoring position on a double steal, redshirt junior
Jarrett Flaggert cashed in with a line drive into center that drove in two before the first out of the game was even recorded. A perfectly executed squeeze bunt by junior
Hunter Azemar later in the frame would bring Flaggert home for the third run, and the scoring would then be capped off on a two-out error that allowed senior
Jackson Smith to race home from third.
With this early advantage, A&M-Corpus Christi continued to push in the first part of the game, adding another in the third to build even more of a cushion. This run came in very impressive fashion, as after senior
Christian Smith-Johnson reached on a two-out base hit, he managed to come all the way home from first on a single error by Lamar's second baseman, never slowing down and turning on the jets around third to easily beat the throw home from shallow center field.
As it turned out, this would be all of the scoring that the Islanders would need, with their pitching taking this run support and running with it all the way to the finish line. Kicking off this strong effort on the mound was junior
Easten Smith, who took the ball for his second start of the season and spun what was arguably the team's best outing to date, tossing 6.2 innings of one-run ball while walking just one and punching out five batters. The righty began his day very well, striking out the first two hitters he faced and allowing just two runners to reach through his first three frames of work. Smith did run into some trouble in the middle innings, surrendering his lone run in the fourth and facing a second-and-third, one-out scenario in the fifth, but he managed this traffic with minimal damage before once again finding his groove and sitting down seven of the last nine Cardinals that he faced.
Smith's outing was easily the longest for any Islanders pitcher so far this year, surpassing the previous high of five innings reached four different times, including himself most recently last Friday against Northwestern State in relief. It was also the first quality start of the season for A&M-Corpus Christi, and it helped lower his ERA on the season to a minuscule 0.87 in his team-leading 20.2 innings of work.
"Things haven't been going our way, but
Easten Smith went out there and turned that thing around," Islanders head coach
Scott Malone said. "We had some guys get banged up last week, so we felt like we had this older guy in Easten that's been through the battles to reshuffle the cards and put on Friday night, and he went out there and pitched like a veteran does. He took the team on his shoulders and got after it, and we're excited for him"
After Smith's exit, the Islanders needed just one more arm to go the rest of the way, with the honor of securing the final seven outs going to junior
Chase Mayer. The lefty's outing started off wobbly, with a walk and an error loading the bases with two outs and bringing the tying run to the plate, but he escaped this jam by inducing a flyout to center to end the threat. After this, though, Mayer mowed down the Cardinals with brutal efficiency, retiring the final six hitters of the game in order and punching out four to help secure the much-needed victory for the Islanders.
"He was off-kilter for a couple hitters and had to reset it, but once he reset it, he was going," Malone said on Mayer. "It was an above-average two- or three-pitch mix, and I thought he had a good hitting team on their heels down the stretch."
At the plate, A&M-Corpus Christi was able to get its offense going in unique fashion, overcoming its lack of extra-base hits by recording three sacrifices and reaching base via the hit-by-pitch a whopping five times. Individually, Flaggert had the biggest swing of the day in the opening frame to record the only multi-RBI game for either team, and he was joined in the hit column by Sanchez, Smith-Johnson, Azemar, graduate
Karson Krowka and junior
Max Towchik.
The Islanders will now take their first crack at winning the series over the Cardinals in the second game of the set on Saturday, returning back to Chapman Field for first pitch at 2 p.m.
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