Baseball off to a rocky start
USU Eastern baseball traveled to St. George the weekend of Feb. 22 and 23, to play in consecutive double headers against Prairie Baseball. The men were unable to get a win this weekend, but they were able to see which combinations of players worked well together, which led to improvements over the course of the weekend.
This archived article was written by: Ryan Nelson
USU Eastern baseball traveled to St. George the weekend of Feb. 22 and 23, to play in consecutive double headers against Prairie Baseball. The men were unable to get a win this weekend, but they were able to see which combinations of players worked well together, which led to improvements over the course of the weekend.
On Feb. 22, was a low-scoring game with Prairie coming out on top 4-1. The teams were almost equal in their hits-to-at-bat ratio. Prairie went 4-28, and Eastern went 6-24. The main difference in the outcome of this game was the errors. Eastern had five, while Prairie managed to play a perfect defensive game.
Coach Scott Madsen said, “We didn’t play as well as the previous tournament. With a team like that, they will expose your mistakes and they seemed to take advantage of every mistake that we made.” Hayden Basinger scored Eastern’s only run of the game. The second game that day was a higher-scoring game, final score being 21-13 for Prairie. Eastern had 30 at bats, but were only able to come up with eight hits. Tayson Wilson, Kameron King, and Sam Trout led the team with two hits each.
Saturday’s games held much of the same for Eastern. The morning game was 10-2 in Prairies favor. Chance Abrath scored on a ground out by Kyle Durbin, and Jake Meservey hit a home run. The second game of the day was once again a high scoring game for both teams, but again Prairie came out on top scoring 25 runs to Eastern’s 13. The men went 12-29 at bat, compared to Prairie’s 16-38. Abrath and Gentry Hatch led the team with three hits each. Coach Madsen was not thrilled with how his team performed throughout the weekend, but was happy that they finally started scoring. “The team really improved scoring runs. They made the adjustments and hit across a lot of runs.”
Although unable to get a win, Eastern figured out the most important aspect in the game of baseball. It takes both offense and defense to win a game. With this new mentality, the Eagles are prepared to play their first home games against the Utah All-Stars on March 1-2.
