COLLEGE STATION, Texas \u2014 The USC baseball team couldn\u2019t make the most of its opportunities and now faces an uphill climb in the NCAA tournament.<\/p>\n
Adrian Lopez gave the Trojans a lead with a home run in the bottom of the eighth inning on Friday night, but Texas State\u2019s Chase Mora answered with a two-run homer in the top of the ninth, leading the Bobcats to a 5-4 victory in an NCAA regional opener at Blue Bell Park.<\/p>\n
USC (43-16) had chances throughout the game, but wasted most of them, stranding runners in scoring position in each of the first seven innings. USC stranded 13 runners overall, going 1 for 14 with runners in scoring position.<\/p>\n
The Trojans, who reached the Big Ten Tournament semifinals, have lost four of their last five games.<\/p>\n
USC will face Lamar University (34-26), which blew a five-run lead in its 7-5 loss to host Texas A&M (40-14), in an elimination game on Saturday at 1 p.m. PT. The Trojans will need to win four games Saturday-Monday to win the four-team regional and advance to a best-of-three super regional.<\/p>\n
USC right-hander Grant Govel, a Palos Verdes High product who was an All-Big Ten first-team selection this season, allowed three runs on four hits with two walks while striking out six in 5\u2154 innings.<\/p>\n
Mora\u2019s sacrifice fly to right field gave the Bobcats a 1-0 lead in the second inning, but the Trojans scored an unearned run in the second and third innings to take the lead. Former Cypress High standout Abbrie Covarrubias hit a solo home run to left in the fourth to extend the USC lead to 3-1.<\/p>\n
Texas State\u2019s Brady Boles tied the score at 3-3 with a two-run home run to left in the top of the fifth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"COLLEGE STATION, Texas \u2014 The USC baseball team couldn\u2019t make the most of its opportunities and now faces…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":712581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2289],"tags":[5,15310,648,1703,1694,2341,185,18076],"class_list":["post-712580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-college-baseball","tag-baseball","tag-big-ten-conference","tag-college-baseball","tag-college-sports","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-baseball","tag-sports","tag-usc-sports"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116662429523205454","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/712581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}