Baseball | 5/11/2015 5:30:00 PM
ABILENE – The ACU Wildcats are back on the road Tuesday night to take on the nation's fourth-ranked team in the Horned Frogs of TCU at Lupton Stadium. The game serves as the final regular-season home game for eight Horned Frogs.
First pitch from the TCU campus is set for 6:30 p.m., and the game can be heard locally on 98.1 FM The Ticket. After Tuesday night's road game, the Wildcats will return to Abilene for their final Southland Conference series of the season, a three-game series against Incarnate Word (Thursday-Saturday) at Crutcher Scott Field.
The Wildcats enter Tuesday night's game at 13-34 overall, while the Horned Frogs are 39-9. ACU is 0-7 against top-25 teams this season with four of those losses coming by one run. One of those one-run losses was a 4-3 loss to then-No. 2 TCU on April 6 in Abilene.
ACU goes into the game Tuesday after being swept by Northwestern State last weekend in a Southland Conference series at Crutcher Scott Field. The Wildcats lost the first game of the series, 6-5, after taking a 5-0 lead after one inning. The Demons, however, chipped away, finally tying the game at 5-5 in the seventh inning. The game was suspended by lightning Friday night, and Northwestern State scored in the top of the 12th inning Saturday when the game was resumed to take the win.
Senior outfielder
Tyler Eager leads the Wildcats with a .293 batting average to go along with one home run and 29 RBI, while sophomore second baseman
Russell Crippen leads the team with three home runs and has 25 RBI to along with them.
Freshman right-hander
Drew Hanson (1-2, 4.46 ERA) is scheduled to get the start on the mound for the Wildcats against TCU.
TCU has a two-game lead atop the Big 12 standings and needs just one win at Oklahoma this weekend to claim the Big 12 regular season championship. Connor Wanhanen (.373, 30 RBI) and Cody Jones (.359, 3 home runs, 23 RBI) continue to lead the Horned Frogs offensively.
Meanwhile, on the mound, TCU allowed just one earned run last weekend in a two-game sweep of Kansas to drop TCU's team ERA to 2.14, which leads the country. Sophomore right-hander Mitchell Traver is scheduled to be the starter for Tuesday night's game against the Wildcats. Traver is 6-2 with a 2.08 ERA and 57 strikeouts in 56 1/3 innings of work.
