VIDEO: 2015 Carson-Newman vs Cedarville Game 1 Highlights
VIDEO: 2015 Carson-Newman vs Cedarville Game 2 Highlights
JEFFERSON CITY, Tenn. – Looking to continue its weekend success at home, Carson-Newman (3-3) welcomes Cedarville (0-3) to the Silver Diamond Baseball Complex for a three-game series starting at 12:00 p.m. on Friday with a doubleheader.
Instead of playing a doubleheader as scheduled on Saturday, the two squads will now play a doubleheader tomorrow starting at noon. The final game of the series will be Saturday at 1:00 p.m.
Dating back to the 2022 season, Carson-Newman has won six straight home series. During this stretch, four of those series' have been sweeps including one this season against King.
The Carson Newman bullpen has been the story of this season so far. The bullpen ERA is 1.99 through six games with 11 different pitchers recording a scoreless outing. Only one reliever has allowed multiple runs. The Eagles have 36 strikeouts in 31 innings from their bullpen. The team's ERA is also very solid at 3.53, second-best in the SAC and 26th best in the country. C-N is coming off a performance where it allowed zero earned runs in the 4-2 loss to Tusculum on Tuesday.
Slow starts have killed Carson-Newman this season. The Eagles have been outscored 20-8 in the first three innings of games and have only scored first one time in six games. C-N has made up for it in the middle innings, holding an 18-3 run differential in innings four through six.
Carson-Newman still leads the country in hit by pitches with 23 through six games. Six different guys have been drilled by a pitch with Trey Miller (Rocky, Point, N.Y) having been hit by a team-high four.
The Eagles offense has been able to put runners on base often, but has struggled driving those runs in. C-N has stranded 29 runners the past two games and has just seven runs on 19 hits in the two games combined. Griffin's team is hitting .255 with runners on base. Carson-Newman has 16 at bats with the bases loaded and has just three hits, a .188 average. All while managing to get the leadoff guy aboard 40% of the time.
"I want to see when guys on are on that we get a quality at bat," Carson-Newman head coach Tom Griffin said. "Make hard contact, not saying to get hits, just have good at bats where we are swinging at good pitches more than not. When we do take a swing with confidence, we are barreling balls up and then we see what happens from it. We are not doing that so I would love to see that happen."
The weekend series with Cedarville will be the first meeting since 2015 and just the third time the two schools square off on the diamond. In the only two meetings in 2015, C-N outscored the Yellow Jackets 30-5 in the two victories. The Eagles managed 20 runs on 20 hits and used a five-run third inning to create separation. The next day, C-N was just as good at the plate and on the mound recording 10 more runs on 11 hits and only allowing Cedarville to score twice. The Eagles scored ten unanswered runs that day to win convincingly.
After being picked to finish last in the G-MAC, Cedarville got swept by Lincoln Memorial during opening weekend. The Yellow Jackets lost the three contests by four, five and ten runs. Cedarville will not have played in 13 days when heading to Mossy Creek.
The offense has produced nine runs in the first three games of the season. Boston Torres has a team-high six hits in just eleven at bats including a home run. Six different players have at least an RBI and seven had multiple hits for the Yellow Jackets in the opening season series.
The pitching staff for Cedarville had a 9.82 ERA in 22 innings thrown against LMU. Wyatt Fisher and Max Doepker were the only two pitchers to not allow an earned run in their appearances. The staff did walk nine batters but struck out 21 including six from Tate Marland in his start.
It's a Cedarville team led by Matt Richter who is in his second season as head coach. He takes over a program that has not had a winning season since 2014. Despite being five games below .500 in 2022, the team did manage to finish one game above .500 in conference play, the first time it achieved that mark since 1990.
Tomorrow's doubleheader begins at 12:00 p.m. All three contests will air on the Eagle Sports Network with video available on FloSports with a paid subscription and an audio-only stream on cneagles.com/live.
