#6 Aggies upset in first round
ABILENE, Texas (May 2) – With a target on their backs the size of Texas, the nationally-ranked #6 Cameron Aggie baseball team (41-14) kicked off the Lone Star Conference Championship tournament today as the event’s top seed. Unfortunately, the Black and Gold fell to the #6 seed Tarleton State Texans 6-3 in the opening round. CU is now one loss away from elimination.
“We did not play well at all today,” Head Coach Todd Holland said. “We are a much, much better team than we played this afternoon. Tarleton State is a great team so take nothing away from them, but we had one of our worst games today. Hopefully we got our bad game out of the way for the postseason.”
The Aggies won the regular season series with the Texans 3-1, but today were unable to come up with a victory. CU is also currently ranked #1 in the NCAA South Central Region.
Today’s game started out rough for Cameron as Tarleton State scored a trio of unanswered runs in the first 2.0 innings. A fourth score put TSU up 4-0 heading into the fifth.
CU was held scoreless until senior centerfielder Josh Barnett scored an unearned run off of an error by the shortstop in the bottom of the fifth.
The Aggies continued to put runs on the board and got right back in the ballgame heading into the ninth and final inning down only 4-3. The Texans hit a two-run shot in the top of the ninth to go up 6-3, and Cameron was unable to recover.
Tarleton State scored 6 runs on 12 hits with 3 errors, while Cameron scored 3 runs on 7 hits with 6 errors.
“Top ten teams don’t commit 6 errors in a game,” Coach Holland said. “We need to play better in the field and at the plate if we are going to keep playing in this tournament.”
Senior Brad Bichel (11-2) recorded just his second loss of the year in the near-complete game effort. Bichel went 8.0 innings allowing only 4 runs, 2 earned, on 10 hits. He faced 36 batters, giving up 2 walks and throwing 3 strikeouts.
Two more Aggie seniors, Chris Caves and Kyle Nyhart, contributed CU’s only RBI’s with separate solo home runs. Caves finished 1-4 and Nyhart ended up 1-3.
“We are very disappointed with this loss, but I am confident that we’ll be able to rebound,” Coach Holland said. “We’ll regroup tonight and come back refocused tomorrow. We didn’t come here to go 0-2.”
With the loss CU goes onto play the Eastern New Mexico Greyhounds in an elimination game tomorrow (Sunday) at 11:00am at Crutcher Scott Field. If Cameron wins they will play at 3:00pm on Monday against the winner of the Angelo State-Abilene Christian/Southeastern Oklahoma State match-up.
Should CU lose tomorrow’s ENMU game, the Aggies will be eliminated from the LSC Championship tournament. As the current top seed in the region, CU has all but locked up a spot in the NCAA South Central Region Championships (May 14-17). A site for the regional event has yet to be determined.
Today’s CU-TSU game was scheduled to be broadcast on the Aggie Video Network on the Cameron Athletics website, but connectivity issues prevented the transmission. After working through the unavoidable problems, the next scheduled broadcast will be tomorrow’s second-round Aggie baseball game.
