OMAHA, Neb. -- The Omaha baseball team dropped its series finale with Oral Roberts Sunday afternoon, falling 16-8 at Seymour Smith Park. The league-leading Mavericks are now 9-13 (5-1 Summit League), while the Golden Eagles improve to 13-9 (4-2).
Thomas DeBonville led the Mavericks at the plate, going 3-for-5 with two runs and two RBI and his second home run of the year.
Adam Caniglia (2-for-5, two RBI),
Max Gamm (2-for-4, one run) and
Braden Rogers (2-for-5) also had multi-hit performances.
On the mound, the win went to Justin McGregor (2-0), who allowed four runs on five hits and two walks with six strikeouts over 5.0 innings.
Jake Pennington (2-3) took the loss, giving up five runs (two earned) on four hits and a walk with a season-high six strikeouts over 5.0 innings of work.
Omaha built a 2-0 lead in the bottom of the fourth with a two-out, two-run single up the middle by Caniglia to plate
Grant Suponchick and
Tyler Daugherty. They quickly added it to in the fifth when DeBonville tripled to center and
Keil Krumwiede crushed a two-run shot to left for a 4-0 advantage.
Pennington held ORU hitless through the first five innings. But down four after Krumwiede's homer, the Golden Eagles responded immediately in the sixth with five runs on four hits and three errors for a 5-4 lead.
Noah Cummings' two-run triple to left center added to ORU's lead in the seventh to make it 7-4.
In the bottom half of the inning, DeBonville led off with a first-pitch solo homer to left, which trimmed it to 7-5.
The Golden Eagles added two more insurance runs in the eighth with Jack Rosenberg's leadoff homer to left and Cal Hernandez's two-run single up the middle at 10-5.
Omaha got all three runs back with three hits in the bottom half of the inning, using RBI singles up the middle from DeBonville and
Cole Thibodeau and a wild pitch to make it a two-run ballgame at 10-8. But ORU went on a tear in the top of the ninth, as homers from Rosenberg, Cummings and Riley Keizor propelled the Golden Eagles to a six-run inning and a 16-8 advantage.
Omaha returns to action with a midweek tilt at Kansas State this Tuesday, March 27, with first pitch at 6:30 p.m. in Manhattan, Kan. Links to live stats and audio will be available on OMavs.com.
