Rice got back from their finals break to play a disappointing Texas A&M - Corpus Christi team Wednesday night. This year TAM-CC came in 17-29. Their pitching staff has an ERA over 7. Rice won. The final score was 14-2.

Rice started Jared Rogers. He seems to be our midweek starter of choice. He has great stuff but often not so much control. Tonight the plate umpire seemed to be calling a very wide zone both inside and out. This certainly helped Jared. The umpire called it consistently for all three strikes meaning there were several called strikeouts.

Rogers went four innings. Then Mark Haynes went two innings. Then we got a pleasant surprise. Ryan Berry started the seventh inning. His velocity was good. He had a little trouble with control but mainly he had trouble getting his infielders to make plays. It looked like balls coming off the bats were knuckling. Anyone he got four outs and finally retired the side. Then Diego Seastrunk pitched the eighth and the first batter in the ninth. After get a lot of full counts in the eighth he struck out the first man in the ninth in dominating fashion. WG seemed to have seen enough so he came out and replaced him with Matt Evers. Evers got the last two outs. It was good to see a few pitchers get to air it out and get some of the rust out.

Rogers gave up two solo home runs, one to the opposing starting pitcher. Rice was down 2-0 before the onslaught. After the starter, who someone said was their closer, they pitched two seldom used relievers with ERA's well over 10. Natch, we struggled against them. But after getting one run in the third I think and then breaking through for three in the fourth off the starter Rice got rolling. Rice got three more in the sixth. In the eighth, with Rice up 7-2 the AM-CC manager brought in a starter to mop up. Natch, this is the guy we beat around. We scored seven in the eighth to break it open to 14-2. The starter got tagged for all of them.

Anyway there might have been a few jitters after getting down 0-2. We certainly wondered what a loss to these guys would do for our RPI. But the kids battled hard.
The three run fourth was done on an interesting play. The bases were loaded, full count and two outs. So the runners took off with the pitch. The alert start by the runner on first allowed three runs to easily score on a single. That was an unusual play to say the least.

The pitcher who hit the home run tagged it very well to left field. It was well over the berm out there. That was his twelfth home run of the year.

Diego Seatrunk can bring it hard and his ball has amazing movement. I suspect he will be projected as a reliever. He needs to work on command but he has a major league arm.