The Cardinals threw plenty of arms at the Longhorns Tuesday night. But the Longhorns sent each Lamar pitcher to the dugout in quick fashion as Texas backed up its nine-run outing on Sunday with another nine runs on Tuesday night in a 9-5 victory over Lamar.
Longhorn batters never saw the same Lamar pitcher for more than an inning as the Cardinals exhausted seven arms through the first five innings.
“It’s tough,” redshirt junior Bret Boswell said. “You really can’t prepare for that. So what you’ve got to do is watch in the dugout, you’ve got to watch when you’re on deck to try to get your timing down before you’re in there. You’ll see the guy once and then see a new guy the next time.”
A baseball player can change the momentum of a game with a single swing of his bat. Boswell did just that.
Lamar’s sophomore pitcher Ryan Erickson handed Boswell a pitch in the zone during a 1-0 count. The second baseman teed off for a two-run homer to swipe the lead, 4-3, from the Cardinals during the third inning.
“That felt great,” Boswell said. “Right when I put the swing on it, it’s one of those where you don’t even feel it off the bat. I just watched it go and it was just a great feeling.”
The Cardinals quieted the crowd with a big swing of their own as freshman second baseman Cole Coker went deep during the second inning.
But the Longhorns’ second baseman responded to Coker’s damage with another bomb during the third inning. Boswell made his way around the bases four times throughout the game and brought two teammates along the way with a pair of RBIs. His sharp eye in the batter’s box allowed him to stay relaxed throughout the game.
“I’m picking up pitches a lot faster, pretty much right out of the pitcher’s hand,” Boswell said. “When I’m relaxed, I can see that easily and I’m not thinking about it too much, it just makes it a lot easier, the swing is a lot easier.”
The Longhorns added three more runs to the scoreboard during the fifth inning to make it a wide-open 7-3 game. Although junior centerfielder Stefanos Panayiotou attempted to make a Cardinal comeback with a two-run shot to the right field bullpen during the seventh inning, junior left fielder Travis Jones secured the Longhorn win with a sliding RBI triple later in the inning.
Boswell’s two-run swing also brought sophomore pitcher Nick Kennedy his first win of the season. Sophomore right-hander Beau Ridgeway closed the game during the last two innings, as the Longhorn fight song boomed from the stadium speakers after his last pitch.
“Beau Ridgeway is so reliable,” head coach David Pierce said. “He’s going to throw strikes, he’s going to have a little sink on the ball and they’re going to have to earn it against him. That’s the quality outing that we need.”
The Longhorns leave UFCU Disch-Falk Field for their first road series of the season against Stanford on Thursday at 8 p.m.
“Sunday was a great confidence builder and I thought we really did a great job of feeding off of that tonight,” Pierce said. “Offensively, we want to build off of this. We know it’s going to be tight games out there (at Stanford).”
