ARKADELPHIA – The Ouachita baseball team came away with a 5-1 non-conference victory over cross-street rival Henderson State on Wednesday at home in the first of five regular season matchups between the two squads this season.
The Tigers (9-8) continued their streak of productive pitching performances on Wednesday with six scoreless innings to start the game from
Kyzer Smith and
Hayden Childers. Smith kept HSU (10-10) scoreless on four hits with six strikeouts and just one walk in the first 4.2 innings in a no-decision. Childers earned his first win of the season with 3.1 innings of relief, giving up just one run on one hit.
Cameron Marchant came on to toss a perfect ninth inning to seal the win.
Offensively, the Tigers rattled off a season-high 13 hits, marking the sixth double-digit performance as a team this season.
Michael Quinones started his 3-for-4 day with a two-run homerun in the third inning to break the scoreless tie. It was his first round-tripper of the season.
Neither team scored again until the seventh when the Reddies scratched across their only run after getting a leadoff walk and then working the runner around the bases with the ball staying in the infield on a sac bunt, an infield single, and then an RBI groundout.
The Tigers answered in the bottom of the seventh on a solo homerun by
Wesley Scott, his third of the season. Ouachita took advantage of a wild pitch and an error by HSU to score the final two runs.
In addition to Quinones' three-hit performance, Scott,
G. Allen, and
Joseph Bolin also had multi-hit games with two hits each.
The Tigers are back in action this weekend on the road against Arkansas Tech for a three-game Great American Conference series that will be played as a single game on Saturday, March 9 at 6 p.m. and a doubleheader on Sunday starting at 1 p.m.
