Fundamental lapses cost Texas Tech baseball in finale vs. Texas

The day before the first Big 12 series of the season began, Texas Tech baseball coach Tim Tadlock said the 17th-ranked Red Raiders needed to take two of three from No. 22 Texas.

It was right there for the Red Raiders after an eventful fourth inning on Sunday. In the top of that inning, the Longhorns' Max Belyeu homered and the inning ended with a collision and a dust-up between the Longhorns' Will Gasparino and Tech first baseman Gavin Kash.

The crowd at Dan Law Field/Rip Griffin Park got charged up over that, and then charged up even more when T.J. Pompey and Tracer Lopez homered back-to-back leading off the home half of the fourth.

Instead of channeling that positive energy, the Red Raiders collapsed. Texas scored in every inning from the fourth through the seventh, took advantage of Tech fundamental lapses and won 9-7.

"Good teams pitch, play defense and run the bases," Tech coach Tim Tadlock said, "and we didn't do that today."

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"I think we reacted well," said Texas third baseman Peyton Powell, who fueled his team's comeback with a homer in the fifth inning, a go-ahead double in the sixth and a sacrifice fly in the seventh. "I think we all fed each other the same energy. We all kept voicing that we were going to win the game; we just didn't know how or when, and that's contagious in the dugout."

Texas (9-6, 2-1) is off to the SEC after this school year, and no end to a Texas Tech-Texas series seems complete without a collision making people mad. In basketball, it was UT's Brock Cunningham running into Darrion Williams in pursuit of a loose ball.

On Sunday, a seemingly harmless groundout to second triggered tempers when Gasparino knocked down Kash while running through the bag at first base.

"It was very incidental there," Texas coach David Pierce said. "Gavin, the ball took him behind the bag, and Will was going full speed down the line, so there was contact.

"In Gavin's defense, he didn't really know what happened. In Will's defense, he couldn't stop. Both kind of reacted just because of the contact."

Players and staff came out of both dugouts, but no punches were thrown and the situation didn't escalate. Kash had his back turned and hadn't cleared the basepath, and umpires reviewed the play to judge whether Gasparino made malicious contact.

"I don't think it was," Tadlock said. "If that big ol' guy wanted to make it malicious, I mean, somebody's ... He's a big kid."

Gasparino is listed at 6-foot-6. MLB Pipeline rated him a top-100 draft prospect coming out of high school last year and, in his profile, assessed Gasparino on the 20-80 scouting scale as a 60-grade runner, meaning plus or well above average.

"It's hard to stop that body," Pierce said.

Tadlock appeared less bothered by the dustup than by his team's fundamental lapses. The Red Raiders committed two errors, each leading to an unearned run. Pompey's error at shortstop opened the door on Texas' three-run sixth. Reliever Trendan Parish had a hard time getting the door shut, allowing five runs on four hits in 1 1/3 innings.

Down 9-7 in the eighth, Tech leadoff batter Dylan Maxcey was thrown out trying to stretch a single into a double. Barring that, Kash would have come up as the tying run, having already homered. Earlier in the game, Gage Harrelson was picked off after he'd stolen second.

"Fundamentally, you'd like to get a little bit better," Tadlock said. "Fifteen games in, you'd like to be a little bit better. If we've got to make some adjustments to play better defense, we'll do that, because you're going to need to do that. You'd like to see that game if it plays out (error-free) that way."

Parish was the third of six Tech pitchers. After the Pompey error, Parish yielded hits to three of the next four batters, plus a leadoff double in the seventh.

"It seemed like he was getting leverage in the count and then making a mistake, and they made him pay for it," Tadlock said. "... It's always easy to say we could go to another arm. We did go to some other arms, and they weren't great either."

Texas came into the series on a four-game losing streak, though three of the losses were to highly ranked teams.

"Coming here to a packed stadium and trying to find our identity here, it's a tough atmosphere to do it," Powell said. "But we came together as a team and found part of our identity and hope to keep doing that."

Asked if he will miss coming into Tech's stadium, Pierce said, "I'll miss the competition against Texas Tech for sure."

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Fundamental lapses cost Texas Tech baseball in finale vs. Texas