The Incarnate Word baseball team fell behind early, but came back for a 9-7 victory against Eastern New Mexico on Saturday, completing the three-game sweep of the Greyhounds in Lone Star Conference play.
UIW (13-5 overall, 12-3 LSC) fell behind 5-1 in the fifth inning but responded with seven runs over the next two innings for the 8-5 lead.
The scoring started with a 2-run home run by John Zule that scored Derrick Walls to close the gap to 5-3. Then, the Cardinals got two runs home courtesy of a double by Walls that scored Matt Flores and Brandon Clark. The game tied, Walls reached third on a wild pitch and then scored on a sacrifice fly from Zule to take the lead, 6-5. Still in the sixth, UIW had a double by Steven Vidaurri, then an RBI single by Matt Roohan to score Vidaurri (7-5 UIW). Finally, Roohan scored courtesy of an RBI single by Jackson Woodruff.
Eastern New Mexico, however, responded with a two-run homer in the 8th as part of a 2-run, 4-hit inning that ended when Walls fielded a single and threw a perfect ball to Roohan whose turnaround throw to Qualls at catcher was in time to beat the Greyhound runner trying to score.
That throw at the plate prevented the score from being knotted up at eight runs for each team, and the Cardinals were up 8-7.
UIW added an insurance run in the eighth inning when Leroy Urbina hit a single with bases loaded that allowed Roohan to score for the 9-7 lead. Incarnate Word had a chance to make it 10-7 on the same play, but Woodruff tripped while rounding third and wasn't able to recover in time before getting tagged by the catcher.
In the ninth, Elroy Urbina got the Greyhounds to ground out 1-2-3 to end the game. His pitching earned him his third save of the season (second this weekend) and the win went to Keith Vasquez, who took over in the fifth after ENMU had scored 4 runs against starter Ethan Lutz.
Lutz struck out five and walked just one. Vasquez was the pitcher of record when UIW took the lead.
The Cardinals host Texas AM International on Tuesday in a 3 p.m. doubleheader of two seven-inning games.
