After suffering two difficult losses at the hands of the Xavier Musketeers, Texas A&M baseball was able to respond with a 15-0 victory Sunday afternoon.
A&M coach Rob Childress said he was happy with the way his team responded to close out the series.
“When you go into any season, you never truly know what the team’s identity is going to be,” Childress said. “You have to forge that as you go through some adversity, and you saw we had that right out of the gates yesterday. But, to be able to respond the way we did with such an exclamation point says a lot about the character of our group moving forward.”
A&M started off the matchup quickly by scoring a run in the bottom of the first off of a fielder’s choice by Austin Bost. The Aggies followed the next frame with another three runs off a leadoff homer from Bryce Blaum. The other runs were scored from a pair of RBI singles from Logan Sartori and Bryan Sturges.
In the next four innings, A&M would go on to score runs in the third, fourth and fifth innings to increase its lead to 7-0 going into the top of the seventh.
A notable performer in the game was starting pitcher Jonathan Childress. He was able to throw 4.2 scoreless innings while racking up nine strikeouts. Childress also passed the 100 pitch threshold in his start, which was something he said he was proud to accomplish.
“It was huge,” Childress said. “I haven’t thrown over 100 pitches in over three years probably, since high school. Even when I was healthy my freshman year, we were still building up, and I was getting cut off at about 70 pitches. So, throwing 100 pitches was great and really good for my mental state because I know I can still do it.”
The Aggies blew the game open in the seventh by scoring seven runs to expand their lead to 14-0. A&M would continue its scoring ways in the next inning after Hunter Coleman hit the Aggies’ third home run of the game.
A&M would go on to win 15-0 over Xavier.
Sturges said the Aggies put together a complete team performance to close out the series.
“We played as a team today,” Sturges said. “We came in and took some of those big swings out of the game. We took a lot of big swings yesterday. You know, first day, you decide to try to go for the fences a little bit, but today we settled in and got the ball moving, got traffic on the bases. When we get traffic, we play fast.”
Offensively, catcher Mikey Hoehner and Sturges led the way with three RBIs each. The Aggies were also able to rack up 15 hits, and five pitchers combined to strikeout 14 Musketeers.
Up next for A&M is a Tuesday home matchup against Abilene Christian. The first pitch at Blue Bell Park is set for 6:32 p.m.