Midweek baseball had not been kind to No. 2 Texas baseball in recent weeks. Ahead of their matchup against the Texas State Bobcats on Tuesday, the Longhorns had dropped back-to-back midweek games against the Tarleton State Texans and Houston Cougars.
And the Longhorns wouldn’t have an easy task heading into UFCU Disch-Falk Field with the Bobcats finding a recent run of success in the state’s capital, with Texas State winning the last four straight games in Austin.
However, the Longhorns would get back on track in their midweek affairs, taking down the Bobcats in a high-scoring 10-8 matchup on Tuesday night.
“We just need to win a ballgame,” head coach Jim Schlossnagle said. “We need to play well, and I think we didn’t play awesome. Though we competed pretty well when they brought in their better pitchers … that’s a good team, you know.”
Tuesday night was a big night for both squads offensively, combining for 18 runs on 22 hits with six of those hits being home runs, and the Longhorns were the team needing to battle back into the game after trailing early, with the Bobcats scoring three runs in the first inning.
As the ballgame headed into the middle innings, the Longhorns continued to be behind on the scoreboard, reaching the sixth inning down 5-3, and it would be behind a six-spot in the sixth inning in which Texas would flip the script.
Junior infielder Casey Borba, with a towering 443-foot solo home run, got a six-run inning started.
The Longhorns would follow that up with three hits with two outs in the inning as junior infielder Ethan Mendoza, junior catcher Carson Tinney, and freshman outfielder Anthony Pack Jr. combined for hits that allowed five runs to score.
After the sixth inning, the Longhorns got out to a big 9-5 lead; however, the four-run cushion wouldn’t last long as the Bobcats responded with three runs in the top of the seventh inning to within one, with the score 9-8 heading into the last two innings of the game.
With the game within distance for the Bobcats, the Longhorns needed some insurance to fend off the Bobcats.
Mendoza put the exclamation point on the Longhorns’ offensive output with a solo home run in the eighth inning, pushing the lead to two runs as the 10-8 lead was enough to secure Texas the win. The junior ended the night 3-4 at the plate with three RBI’s and the homer.
“I was really hoping,” Mendoza said about his home run. “I didn’t know if it was high enough, but I knew I got a pretty good swing, back spun it pretty well. I was running, and I was definitely looking at it.
The Longhorns will get back on the diamond soon as they get ready to hit the road for their fourth Southeastern Conference series of the season against the South Carolina Gamecocks.
The first game of the three-game tilt is slated for Thursday at 6:00 p.m. CT from Columbia, South Carolina.
