BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – As they return to Bowling Green Ballpark for the first time since their 2018 Mid-South Conference Tournament Championship, the Campbellsville baseball team will enter the 2019 tournament looking for their first back-to-back championships since 2008-09.
Their quest begins on Thursday with an opening round match-up against Georgetown College, who moved up to No. 13 in the NAIA Coaches' Poll this past Tuesday. GC will be the home team as the No. 2 seed to CU's No. 3 seed as those placements were locked in after Georgetown swept Campbellsville at HIG Field in last weekend's series.
In that series last weekend, Georgetown won the games by finals of 11-7, 6-3, and the final game score of 5-4 in 11 innings. CU had leads in each of the last two contests of the series on Saturday but could not hold them as they took an early 1-0 lead in game two and had a 4-0 lead into the sixth of game three.
CU finished the regular season with five of their starting position players with top 20 batting averages in the Mid-South Conference led by
Tyler Deason's .367, which is the third in the MSC.
Cale Thompson (.352) is ninth,
Adbiel Morales (.343) is 12
th,
Bryson Wallet (.338) is 17
thand
Tommy Sepulveda (.336) is 18
th.
Unfortunately for the Tigers, they may be without two of those five hitters in the lineup as Morales is recovering from a facial injury and Sepulveda suffered a hand injury in the final game of the regular season. Morales' status is up in the air after he missed the last six games of the regular season but early word on Sepulveda was that he would have to miss the tournament.
Georgetown's leader is their catcher, Chris Gilbody, who has played in 50 of the team's 53 games on the season to a .346 batting average. Their home run leader is that because of his series against CU as center fielder Val Stammler hit four home runs at HIG Field in three game series to move his total from three to seven on the season.
On the mound, Campbellsville and Georgetown didn't get the exact performances they were looking for out of their starters in the series. For GC, Bryan Torres limited CU to only two hits but still gave up three runs in 4.2 innings, Andrew Martinez allowed three runs through five innings but appeared to suffer a right elbow injury on the last pitch he threw in the sixth, and Alvin Vega couldn't make it out of the second inning in game three, allowing four runs.
For Campbellsville, none of their starters got through the sixth inning with the longest outing coming from
Marco Murillo, who went 5.2 innings in game three. Murillo had a 4-0 lead until allowing a three-run home run and solo home run in the sixth to allow Georgetown to tie the game at 4-4.
The Georgetown relief pitchers were impressive last Friday and Saturday as Keon Taylor and Brandon Krennrich each had scoreless outings in two of the three games of the series. Taylor picked up a save and a win on Saturday with Krennrich earning the save in the series opener.
The winner of the game will move on in the winner's bracket to play on Friday at 2:00 p.m. CT/3:00 p.m. ET and the loser will play in a loser's bracket game at 10:00 a.m. CT/11:00 a.m. ET on Friday.
