CEU baseball team goes through dry spell

This archived article was written by: Jeremy Jones

After struggling during the first part of the season, the CEU baseball team was looking forward to being home for a while. A three-week home stand started on Friday, March 26 against Salt Lake Community College.
Kyle Tash pitched a complete game on Friday night for the Eagles and picked up his third win of the season. Tash gave up four runs on seven hits in seven innings pitched. However, only two of the runs were earned and the others came due to team error.
The Eagles were trailing 4-3 going into the bottom of the seventh and had amassed four hits through the first six innings. Then, Salt Lake made a pitching change and the Eagles found some offense late in the game, capped by catcher Corey Newton hitting a walk-off three-run bomb to win the game. Danny Cornia reached first off an error and advanced to third off a single by Travis Wiley. Christison singled and drove in Cornia to tie the game, setting up Newton’s homer.
After the emotional high from earlier that day, the Eagles, again, started off slow during the second game on Friday against SLCC and had to battle back from behind. Kameron Mickolio was the starting pitcher, but he struggled early, giving up six earned runs off of eight hits during the first three innings.
Soren Mundt came in towards the end of the third inning and finished out the game for the Eagles. Mundt only allowed one run off of two hits during his 4 1/3 innings pitched.
At about the same time Mundt came into the game, the Eagles found some offensive power as well. Going into the sixth inning, the Eagles were down 7-4, but they still had some leftover heroics from the game before. The team was able to rally together a string of hits and, once the dust settled, the Eagles came up with four runs off four hits and an 8-7 advantage going into the last inning.
Salt Lake went up, but didn’t even get a hit, leaving one stranded at the end of the game who reached on a walk. Salt Lake also hurt themselves throughout the game by committing three errors that lead to the Eagles moving runners into scoring position, and later scoring.
Saturdays’ games held a different fate for the Eagles, though. Assistant coach John Elswood said, “They’re conditioned, but we had some mental breakdowns that really hurt us. They just didn’t look ready to play.”
SLCC hammered the ball the entire game, started scoring early, and didn’t let up until the very end. S Romrell started pitching, but he gave up five runs off of five hits in just under two innings of play. The Eagles brought in K Killian to try to get their defense set, but things didn’t to much better for him than they had for Romrell. Killian allowed five more runs off nine hits during the rest of the game.
The Eagles didn’t manage a run until the bottom of the sixth inning, and it was too little too late as the Bruins routed the Eagles 10-1.
In the second game on Saturday, both teams started of slowly. No runs were scored until the third inning when the Bruins rattled off three runs off four hits in the inning. With a 4-0 lead in the top of the seventh, the Bruins exploded offensively, knocking in six runs off six hits to seal the game.
The Eagles did muster two runs in the bottom of the seventh, but, again, it wasn’t enough as the Bruins again routed the Eagles 10-2. J Lambson took the loss, dropping his overall record to 2-2 as a starter.
The College of Southern Idaho came to town the next weekend sitting in third place in the region behind Dixie State and the Community College of Southern Nevada. During the first game, which was on Friday, April 2, both teams played well defensively, but the Eagles couldn’t get anything going from the plate. Kyle Tash pitched another complete game and only gave up two runs, but CEU didn’t manage any runs and fell 2-0.
Later that day, the two Golden Eagles squared off again, this time with more offense. CEU got down early and tried to make another come-from-behind victory, but didn’t have enough firepower to get the job done. CSI took the second game 7-6.
On Saturday, April 3, CSI played much more inspired baseball than the Eagles did. According to freshman McKay Bybee, “I don’t know what happened. We just didn’t come ready to play and got killed.” It’s hard to say exactly why, but what happened was the Eagles did get killed both games, 9-1 and 9-3.
With the four straight wins, CSI moved to within one game of the Community College of Southern Nevada and three games of first place Dixie State. The losses put the Eagles in fifth place at 5-15 in conference play and 11-21 overall.
This weekend, the Eagles will host the Community College of Southern Nevada, last year’s national junior college champions, as their last home game of the season. The games start Friday at 12:00 p.m. and Saturday at 1:00 p.m..