The Lobos (13-6, 5-1) continue their road trip after a 14-10 loss to Texas Tech on Tuesday by heading to California for a series at SDSU (4-14, 1-3). In the preseason, these two teams were picked as co-favorites in the conference and so far, it looks like the Lobos are the ones that are living up to the billing. Due to Easter Sunday, the series will take play on Thursday, Friday and Saturday instead of the normal Friday, Saturday, Sunday schedule. It shouldn’t change much for the starting pitchers that will be pitching on 5 days of rest instead of the customary 6 days they’re used to. I like that the Lobos are playing at SDSU while the Aztecs are playing poorly, giving the Lobos a realistic chance at a series win and possibly even a sweep, which could be huge for the overall conference standings. It will be important for the Lobos to jump on SDSU on Thursday, not allowing them to gain confidence, as there is a reason that they were picked as co-favorites in the Mountain West. They can be a dangerous team, so hopefully the Lobos will be able to keep the Aztecs at arm’s length this whole series.
Scattered Thoughts:
- Carl Stajduhar was named MW Player of the Week last week and it looks like he may be on his way to back-to-back honors. In the loss to Texas Tech, Stajduhar kept up his great hitting with a 2-4 game with 2 homeruns and 5 RBIs. After starting out slow, Stajduhar is now hitting .354 with 7 doubles, 7 homeruns, 19 runs and 23 RBIs.
- Chris DeVito has hit safely in 19 straight games and has reached base safely in every game this season. The way they’ve been rolling, the middle of the order with DeVito, Stajduhar and Zoellner is the best in the conference and one of the better ones in the country. Also, as far as I can tell, it looks like during the weekend DeVito is behind the plate and during midweek games he is the DH.
- The last two weekends, the Lobos had a starting pitcher bounce back from a rough start. There’s an opportunity for that to happen again this weekend, as Carson Schneider looks to rebound from what was just an okay outing. Schneider has been fantastic so far this season, making it easy to view last week’s start as an outlier.
San Diego State Aztecs:
The last couple of years, there was a little uncertainty of who was going to be coaching the Aztecs, with the late Tony Gwynn battling cancer. Former UNM assistant Mark Martinez was the fill-in head coach when Gwynn couldn’t coach and became the full-time guy last year. So, this is Martinez’s second season as the head coach, where he is coming off a year where he led the Aztecs to a 41-23 record, finishing MW play 20-10, and won 5 straight games at the MW Tournament to win the automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, where they went 1-2. The start of the season hasn’t gone according to plan, with a 4-14 record and 1-3 in conference play, but the Aztecs have lots of talent, so it may just be a matter of time before they start to play good baseball.
The Aztec offense hasn’t been great this season as a whole, with only two players hitting over .300. One of those is their best hitter, Alan Trejo, who is hitting .385 so far this season. The Aztecs do have a lot of new faces, after losing a good portion of last year’s lineup that included 5 players hitting over .300, so it may be that the coaches were too high in expectations for this Aztec team with so many new starters when they were filling out the preseason poll.
The Aztec pitching staff is led by redshirt freshman Harrison Pyatt, who will be their number 1 starter for the rest of the season. Brett Seeburger has been one of their weekend starters and has pitched okay in the role so far this season. I expect him to start Friday’s game, but they might decide to throw him Saturday – or not at all – instead. In fact, there are a lot of question marks on who will be starting the last two games in this series for the Aztecs, as they seem to still be trying to figure out their rotation. This also means that if the Lobos can prevent those starters from getting deep in games, they should be able to have a great series on offense. That said, SDSU does have a couple of relief pitchers to keep an eye on in Chris Collins and Jacob Erikson. If they’re given the chance to, Collins and Erikson are certainly capable of closing games out.
Conference Standings:
- UNM 5-1
- AFA 4-1
- FSU 4-2
- UNLV 3-3
- SJSU 2-6
- SDSU 1-3
- Nevada 1-4
Series Prediction:
The Lobos should win this series, as I think that they have an edge in both pitching and hitting. I also don’t know if SDSU has the lineup to compete with the Lobo offense, which means that they’ll likely need to get really good pitching to stay in games. I will take the Lobos with a series sweep to improve to 8-1 in Mountain West play.
Game Info:
Who: New Mexico Lobos (13-7, 5-1) at San Diego State Aztecs (4-14, 1-3)
Where: Tony Gwynn Stadium, San Diego California
When: Thursday March 24th 7 PM MT, Friday March 25th 7 PM MT, Saturday March 26th 2 PM MT
Stream: MW Network/ Campus Insiders
Probable Starters:
Game 1: Carson Schneider (3-1, 4.28 ERA) vs. Harrison Pyatt (0-1, 3.27 ERA)
Game 2: Tyler Stevens (3-1, 4.91 ERA) vs. Brett Seeburger (0-0, 4.57 ERA) / TBA
Game 3: Colton Thomson (1-1, 5.52 ERA) vs. Brett Seeburger / TBA