By BRIAN BAUBLITZ, LCU Sports Information Director
STERLINGTON — The Louisiana Christian University baseball program is heading to the NAIA Regionals, taking down regular-season league runner-up Texas A&M-Texarkana for the second straight time, 9-7 Monday in front of a pro-Wildcats crowd.
The triumph gave coach Mike Byrnes’ fifth-seeded club the Red River Athletic Conference Tournament crown. Impressively, LCU single-handedly eliminated the RRAC regular-season champion LSU Shreveport Pilots, ranked fourth nationally, with a pair of wins over the weekend in the tournament.
The title is the first for the Wildcats’ baseball program since 1987 when LC won the Gulf Coast Athletic Conference crown under coach Billy Allgood. LCU (32-19) will now make its first postseason appearance beyond the conference tournament since the 2003 NCCAA World Series.
Monday’s victory did not come easily.
LCU withstood a pair of gut punches after taking leads in the sixth and seventh innings only to watch the Eagles come soaring back in the bottom halves including a seemingly backbreaking three-run, opposite field home run by the conference’s long ball leader Hunter Reid. The Wildcats polished it off by surviving a bases loaded jam in the ninth to win the first conference tournament championship in team history.
The starting pitchers, Trip Flotte (LCU) and Dylan Cabral (TAMUT), refused to blink in the face of danger. Flotte twirled four scoreless innings with four strikeouts and nary a walk while Cabral went 5.1 frames without giving up a run before four consecutive singles by Braden Trull, Tyler McKenna, Harrison Waxley, and finally Nicholas Brunet, whose base rap drew first blood.
Waxley and Brunet then threw the counterblows after TAMUT dropped a three-spot to take the lead, hitting a pair of two-RBI singles in a span of three hitters, to move the Wildcats back in front by a 5-3 margin heading into the seventh inning stretch.
Reid continued his reign of terror on the Cats’ pitching staff, placing a perfectly placed Kade Linn fastball that painted the outside corner over the wall for a seemingly devastating blow that gave the regular-season runner-up yet another late-game advantage.
The resilient men deployed by Byrnes were undeterred, kicking off the comeback in earnest with a selfless sacrifice fly to cut the deficit to one. A routine flyout put the rally in jeopardy, however, Braden Trull kept the scoring train chugging along with a hard shot through the hole in left side to tie the contest.
Then, one of the two championship defining moments happened, as the hero with the nation’s fifth-highest batting average (.443), McKenna, unleashed his team-high seventh round-tripper of the season into the parking lot behind the right field fence as the first-base side bleachers and LCU’s dugout went into mass hysteria mode as he slowly jogged around the pillows, savoring every second.
Linn, continuing into his second full inning of relief on the bump, fearlessly standing face-to-face with the tall task of sitting down the heart of the Texas A&M-Texarkana lineup in the bottom of the ninth to win the ship, including Reid who had taken him deep two innings earlier. It was a promising start for the Orange and Blue as Dakota Leopold was sent back to the bench looking. Reid was smartly pitched around and walked, but then TJ Krause lofted a soft line drive into right-center to put the winning run at the plate. Linn got back on track as he got Jonathan Rios to flail in vain to put LCU on the brink of destiny. Tension hung on every pitch to TJ Hughes, who delivered a two-strike single past a diving Brunet to load the bases.
But Linn notched a called third strike to save the game and head the ‘Cats to postseason glory.
LCU, who lost to this same team in walk-off fashion two days prior, who had to beat the fourth-ranked and three-time defending conference champions twice in a span of three days after failing to crack the win column against LSUS in its previous 19 tries before the tournament, did the seemingly impossible.
Byrnes’ boys became the third LCU team during the 2023-24 athletic calendar to reach the league’s mountaintop and earned a to-be-determined regional destination to be revealed Thursday at 4 p.m. on the NAIA YouTube channel.