ABILENE – Abilene Christian baseball is in Waco Wednesday night for a 6:30 p.m. game vs. the Baylor Bears, which will kick off an eight-game road trip that also will bring the Wildcats to Corpus Christi (March 15-17), Hammond, La. (March 22-24) and Arlington (March 26).
Zach Carlyle and Seth Wilson will handle play-by-play duties on 98.1 FM – The Ticket for the first Wildcats and Bears game on the diamond since 1968. The two sides also played two-game series from 1959 to 1962, plus 1966 and 1967.
ACU enters this week 9-7 overall and 2-1 vs. the Southland Conference after winning its first series against Northwestern State, which won the 2018 league tournament. The Wildcats batted .313 vs. one the league's best pitching staffs, scoring 21 runs and producing 10 extra-base hits that equaled a .495 slugging percentage.
Catcher / DH Luis Trevino and second baseman Dalton Dunn each hit .500 vs. the Demons, while three other players (Lane Bourland, Seth Watts and Derek Scott) hit well over. 380.
The Wildcats began the series with a combined shutout from Spencer Chirpich and Hunter Spaeth, which was the team's first against a Southland Conference club since 2017. Chirpich whiffed eight batters over 5.0 innings in his third consecutive Friday start, and Spaeth scooped up the 4.0 inning save with no hits allowed.
Things went south for the entire pitching staff Saturday in a 24-11 loss, but the club nicely rebounded behind a quality start from senior Jonathan Nicholson. The right-handed pitcher struck out seven in as many innings, leaving the game with a 3-2 lead, and then the Wildcats plated three insurance runs – two on a home run from Watts – during their eighth inning at-bat in support of reliever Brennan Lewis, who has four saves this spring.
The Bears this week slipped out of the D1Baseball.com Top 25 rankings after losing two of three games at home to Nebraska, but are still 10-4 overall and 9-2 at Baylor Ballpark. The defending Big 12 Tournament Champions and NCAA Qualifiers are hitting .321 on the season and have outscored its opposition 107-54, while its pitching staff claims a 3.43 ERA and .207 opponents' batting average.
