The Whitworth baseball team split its two games last Saturday before losing to Texas-Tyler on Sunday afternoon.

On Saturday Whitworth won its first game against Austin College 6-2. Whitworth took control from the beginning scoring a run in the first inning.

“We attacked the pitcher and made him throw a lot of pitches and we eventually got to their bullpen,” sophomore shortstop Nick Motsinger. “ Once we did that, we knew we had a good shot of winning.”

The Pirates recorded three hits and a run in the first inning against Austin to take the early lead. Austin had two errors in the first two innings and didn’t manage to get a run on the board until the bottom of the fifth inning.

Whitworth continued to hit consistently throughout the game and tallied four more hits than Austin.

Saturday evening the Bucs played another game, losing 5-4 to Texas-Tyler.

Whitworth didn’t have a hit until the third inning while Texas-Tyler was able to get its offense going right away and scored a run in both the first and second innings.

“I think our guys could have done a better job of answering when we were down, “ head coach Dan Ramsay said. “We did a fairly good job of battling late in games though.”

Sophomore second baseman Danny Jordan had a run batted in and sophomore catcher Josh Davis scored in the sixth inning for the Pirates first run of the game. Whitworth ended the game with no errors and nine hits against Texas-Tyler on Saturday.

Sunday morning the Pirates took on Texas-Tyler again, but walked away with a 12-2 loss.

“They scored six runs in the second inning and everyone got down on themselves,” junior outfielder Tyler Pfeffer said.

Texas-Tyler had a triple and followed up with a single RBI giving them their first score of the game. An error by Whitworth resulted in a third run in for Texas and they finished the inning with six runs and five RBIs.

The Bucs were able to score two runs in the eighth inning with an RBI by junior first baseman Justin Liu and an RBI for freshman right fielder Blake Thoren but the Bucs couldn’t make up the deficit to win the game and Texas-Tyler ended the weekend with a sweep of the Pirates.

“Today [Sunday] our energy was poor and we didn’t deserve to win,” Pfeffer said.

The trip to Texas was preseason for the Pirates and they begin league play March 9 at home against Puget Sound at Merkel Field.

Contact Sasha Siclait at [email protected]