ABILENE – From now (Monday, April 1) through Friday
USA Baseball is accepting fan nominations for the prestigious Golden Spikes Award, and senior catcher / designated hitter
Luis Trevino certainly has emerged as an ideal candidate after hitting .765 (10-for-14) last week through four games against UT Arlington and Grambling.
Click
HERE to NOMINATE Luis Trevino for the
Golden Spikes Award!
Trevino's efforts at the plate earned him an honorable mention for Southland Sports Hitter of the Week as it lifted his league ranking to No. 1 in both batting average (.431) and slugging percentage (.761). The native of Mission, Texas also is tops in the league with 73 total bases, and is second with 44 base hits, seven home runs and .504 on-base percentage, and third with 30 RBI.
His standing within the conference translates well onto the NCAA rankings page. His batting average is the eighth best in the country, while his number of hits and total bases are easily in the top 25.
Trevino comes into this week's set of games (Tuesday vs. UT Permian Basin, and Fri.-Sun. vs. Incarnate Word) on a 10-game hitting streak, which has lifted his season batting average 40 percentage points. Incredibly, he's gone hitless in only three of 27 games, is one of the toughest players nationally to strike out (8 in 102 AB), and has 15 multi-hit games, including in all four of last week's games.
A graduate of Sharyland HS, Trevino broke a scoreless tie in the fourth at UTA with a RBI single. He then feasted on Grambling pitching over three days at Crutcher Scott Field, ending with a 4-for-4 game Sunday that pushed his current reached base streak to 19 games.
The Wildcats (13-14) hit .373 vs. the Mavericks and Tigers overall with 41 runs scored and seven home runs. ACU's season home run total of 27 is not only No. 1 in the Southland, but it ranks 35th in the NCAA, and with 26 games left in the regular season the Wildcats are four round-trippers shy of matching their 2017 total. Last year's team went deep 26 times.
ACU's pitching staff, meanwhile, picked up three wins and 28 strikeouts while limiting opposing batters to a .255 batting average. Senior
Drew Hanson, who will start Tuesday vs. Permian Basin, got the Wildcats' off to a good start with 5.2 perfect innings at UTA – a game the Wildcats won, 4-2, in improving to 3-2 all-time at Clay Gould Ballpark. Friday junior
Spencer Chirpich scored his fourth win of the spring in a 7-4 win over Grambling, and Saturday senior
Brock Barger was backed by 23 runs of support as he held the Tigers scoreless over 5.0 innings with six strikeouts.
Senior
Brennan Lewis made three appearances out of the bullpen totaling 5.0 innings of work and came away with a pair of saves to lift his season total to seven, which ranks him first in the Southland and 11th nationally.
Permian Basin – a long-time rival of the Wildcats from their days together in NCAA DII – enters Tuesday night's tilt with a 12-17 record. The Falcons also have won three of eight Lone Star Conference games with all three victories coming this past weekend vs. Eastern New Mexico after being swept in a four-game series by Angelo State.
UTPB is hitting .252 as a team led by Skyler Palermo's .278 batting average, three home runs and 17 RBI.
Pemron Burrows looks to be a threat on the base paths as evident by his 17 stolen bases on 20 attempts, which is third best in the Lone Star Conference.
Incarnate Word – another team that's well known to the Wildcats as a DII and DI program – is riding high after beating Texas, 3-2, last Tuesday before sweeping a three-game home series vs. Texas AM&-Corpus Christi. The Cardinals are now 19-10 overall and 8-4 vs. the Southland Conference.
UIW's offense matches up well with the Wildcats. The Cardinals are another hard-hitting team complete with a .306 batting average, 23 home runs and average of 6.8 runs per game, while their pitching staff has a 3.91 ERA, 1.35 WHIP and a 2.63 strikeout to walk ratio.
