Takeaways from URI at Texas A&M
After Rhody baseball's opening series at #11 Texas A&M, these are some key takeaways.
1. Some veteran players are emerging as early contributors.
Greg Cavaliere and Laurence Hill really led the offensive charge for the Rams in the second game and put their team in a position to pull off a major upset. Overall, Jordan Powell, Cavaliere, Hill, and Mike Foley had the most productive weekends in the batter's box for URI. On the mound, Matt Murphy threw well through six innings and deserved to win his outing. After Murphy was pulled from his start, Nick Johnson stepped up big in relief in the second game of the opening weekend series. Also, Taso Stathopoulos, Nick Robinson, and Tyler Brosius each threw for scoreless appearances out of the bullpen.
2. URI's lineup still has many question marks. Half of the position players are not even set in their roles. According to the ESPN commentators, Raphael Cerrato brought 15 position players to Texas, while having every intention of using all of them. In the outfield and as a whole, Jordan Powell is URI's mainstay and consistence presence. For this weekend, Powell had help from Cavaliere, Hill, and Foley like previously mentioned. After the top four hitters from URI, they had little to no offensive production. As an entire team, they had a terrible batting average of .212. Over the course of the series with Texas A&M, they scored just six runs and that included the help of four Aggies' errors during the series.
3. URI choked their opportunity at stealing a win in game two of the series.
With how many errors that the Aggies committed in the second game (three), the door was left wide open for Raphael Cerrato's team to lay down the hammer on their opponent. Even though they had a 3-1 lead, the Rams still had more quality opportunities to grab insurance runs and they fell short each time. Then, in the bottom of the ninth inning, Tyler Barss looked like he was legitimately rattled by the opposing crowd because they kept chanting his name. He was atrocious in the final frame of the second game between the two teams.
4. URI's fielding needs to be addressed and cleaned up immediately.
Over the course of the weekend, the Rams committed three errors (Powell, Josh Brodeur, and Matt Daller each had one) and the team's fielding percentage came out to a subpar 97.1%. If this team wants to contend for another Atlantic 10 title, they need to field better and outperform their opponents in that category.
