My wife and I try to make a few NMSU Aggie baseball games each spring. This year has been a little harder than usual because the wind gods seemed to show up on several of the nights we were thinking of attending at game at Presley Askew field.
The wind at one game that we were hoping to attend was so bad that the event was postponed for several hours because the players couldn’t see the ball well enough in the dust clogged air.
But on Tuesday, it looked like it would be a good one. Weather was perfect and the Aggies were playing archrival New Mexico.
It quickly turned into a comedy of errors, even though the box score showed no actual errors during the portion of the game we witnessed. It was like the Bad News Bears playing the Bad News Bears. The final score was UNM 12, Aggies 10.
The first inning was disastrous, especially for the Aggies. They gave up six runs in the first inning, at least three of them from walks when the bases were loaded because of really bad pitching. Two Lobos were sent sprawling to the ground when they were hit by wild pitches. Another pitch was so bad it went behind the batter. I’d never seen that before in a baseball game.
After the starting Aggie pitcher could only claim one out after the score was 5-0, he was replaced. The Lobo pitching was not much better, with their starting pitcher getting the axe after the Aggies came back late in the inning with three runs.
The first inning took one hour and 15 minutes to complete, with the Aggies giving up seven runs. The second inning was not good for the Lobos, who as you can see let the Aggies almost get back in the game with three runs.
We gave up and went home after five innings (more than three and one-half hours into the contest), but the Aggies seemed to have cleaned up their error-prone ways toward the end of the game.
Trailing 12-6 in the bottom of the eighth inning, the Aggies staged a comeback and got the store to 12-10 with one of their scores a walk-in bases loaded pitching choke by the Logo hurler.
In the bottom of the ninth, the Aggies got a runner on base with a bunt, but could never muster the hits or walks to bring him home.
This hasn’t been the Aggies best year, with their overall record 18-19. UNM isn’t a whole lot better at 20-16. The Aggies will play the Lobos one more time this season, in Albuquerque on April 22.
Overall, it was a fun evening, with the sights and smells of a ball game making you relax and focus on things other than the latest national crisis.
aero-cordero.com 