Southern, NC A&T fall in baseball playoffs
Southwestern Athletic Con-ference champion Southern competed well but fell short of top-seed, Tulane (17-7, Friday) and Louisiana Lafayette (9-1, Saturday), to bow out of the NCAA Div. I Regional baseball tournament in New Orleans.
Tulane improved to 51-9 with its win over the Jaguars but they had to do battle to claim it. Southern jumped out to a 2-0 lead and only trailed 10-7 into the seventh inning before the power of the Green Wave took over. Tulane scored six runs in the bottom of the eighth inning to dash any upset hopes of the Jags.
"It was what I thought it was going to be...a really tough ballgame," Tulane head coach Rick Jones said. "Everyone who saw it knows that the final score is not indicative of how tough that game was."
Five Southern errors opened the door for UL-L to run away in Saturday's game. Southern starting pitcher Damien Givens (7-1) suffered his first loss of the season, allowing four runs on three hits with two strikeouts in 1 2/3 innings of work.
N.C. A&T head baseball coach Keith Shumate knew the one word that could sum up his feeling about his 2005 baseball team. As his program continues to grow, the players on the 2005 team will go down as pioneers. On Saturday, the pioneering Aggies were eliminated from the double elimination NCAA baseball tournament with a 6-3 loss to Oral Roberts in the elimination game of the Clemson Regional. The Aggies fell to host and eventual regional winner, Clemson, 12-2 on Friday.
The Mid Eastern Athletic Conference champion Aggies (27-27) earned the pioneer tag by setting a team record with 27 wins, posting their first back-to-back 20-win seasons and earning their first-ever NCAA Tournament berth.
On Friday, the upstart Aggies played the favored Clemson team, ranked sixth in the nation, to a near standstill, leading 2-1 behind the pitching of ace Michael Hauff, and on the verge of a major upset before surrendering 11 runs in the final two innings of their defeat.
They came up with another strong effort on Saturday, trailing late in the game but loading the bases in both the sixth and eighth innings of the loss to ORU.
Unfortunately for the Aggies, throughout the Regional, pitching depth and timely hitting became an issue. On Friday, Hauff wore down after 150-plus pitches and the Tigers were able to score on the Aggies' bullpen. Starter John Primus seemed to slow down around the sixth inning on Saturday, which might not have been a problem with a few more hits in key situations. The Aggies were just 6-for-40 with runners on base and 3-for-21 with runners in scoring position in their two games .
"It was spring training for us throughout this entire weekend," said Shumate pointing to the Aggies long lay-off between winning the MEAC and playing in the regional. "Give the other guy credit, he made some smart pitches to our power hitters. But when you've been off as long as we have, you lose your rhythm.
"All of this will take a while to soak in," Shumate said. "We've gotten a taste of what it's like, so we don't want to stay away too long."
Shumate has an excellent shot of coming back to a regional as he started six freshman, three sophomores and one junior on Saturday. All of his first-team All-MEAC selections are slated to return next season, including MEAC Player of the Year Jeremy Jones and conference-home run leader Charlie Gamble, conference strikeout leader Hauff and John Primus who pitched seven complete games this year on his way to a 7-3 record.
© 2005 Azeez Communications, Inc.