Utah Tech came out on the short end of an 8-7 see-saw battle at UT Arlington in the first game of a three-game WAC road series on Thursday night at Clay Gould Ballpark.
Utah Tech (8-21/3-7 WAC) fell into a quick hole in the opening frame as the first two Mavericks reached on extra-base hits and later scored as UTA raced out to a 2-0 advantage.
UTA starter Gabe Starks made that early lead stand as he struck out five of the first 11 Trailblazers he faced through the first three innings of his night.
Utah Tech would solve Starks over the next two frames, touching up the Maverick ace for four runs and four hits en route to a 4-2 lead midway through the game.
The Blazers tied the game with two runs in the fourth, the first coming on a
Parker Schmidt opposite single to right that chased
Ethan He home and moved
Zach Thomas to third. Thomas plated the tying run three pitches later when he scampered home on the back end of a double steal.
Utah Tech then took its first lead of the night in the fifth when with a runner on second and one out,
Shane Taylor legged out an inside-the-park home run to put the Blazers on top.
Taylor hit a sinking line drive to center field that got past a diving Maverick outfielder. The ball then rolled all the way to the wall, which allowed the junior third baseman to race around the diamond and score just ahead of the relay throw.
Meanwhile, junior righthander
Brett Porthan (ND) settled in after his rocky first inning as he retired 13 of the next 14 Mavericks he faced with three strikeouts.
However Porthan would run into some bad luck in sixth as UTA started the frame with back-to-back doubles, the first of which came on a miscommunication in the Blazer outfield, which trimmed the Utah Tech lead to 4-3.
The Mavericks (15-16/5-5 WAC) later loaded the bases with two outs and pushed across the tying run on a walk, which spelled the end of the night for the Porthan. Senior reliever
Jake Dahle would come and quell the Maverick rally with a strikeout to send the game to the seventh tied at 4-4.
Utah Tech managed to get those two runs back in the seventh, cashing in consecutive lead-off walks with a
Chase Rodriguez two-run bloop single down the left field line.
Unfortunately for the Blazers their lead would be short lived as UT Arlington loaded the bases to start the home seventh and turned that into a three-run rally to jump back on top at 7-6.
Taylor would pull Utah Tech even at 7-7 with his third RBI of the night in the eighth, but a two-out Trailblazer throwing error with the bases loaded in the home eighth allowed UTA to regain the lead. Maverick reliever Gray Bailey (S, 2) worked around a one-out Blazer hit in the ninth to close out the game.
Taylor extended his hit streak to a career-best 10-straight games as he finished with two hits, two walks and two runs scored to go with his three RBI to lead the Utah Tech offense. The junior infielder, who was issued his first walk to open the game, also became just the second player in the program's NCAA era to draw at least 100 career walks (101).
The Trailblazers wound up with eight hits on the night as seven of the nine hitters in the UT starting lineup had at least one hit. Porthan finished with four strikeouts and only surrendered four runs and five hits in 5.2 innings of work, but did not figure in the decision.
The two teams will play the middle game of their three-game conference series on Friday night beginning at 5:30 p.m. (CT).
