Periodically throughout the season, senior desginated hitter Aaron Cook will supply a blog for Fighting Sioux fans on the ins and outs of the UND baseball program. Cook's blog will also appear on www.pingbaseball.com as he is one of a several Division I baseball players supplying blogs for the collegiate baseball site.
Cook burst onto the scene last season for the Sioux as a redshirt junior, batting .328 with six home runs and 28 RBI. All three of those totals ranked second on the team. The Erskine, Minn., native had just three at-bats in his UND career entering the program's first as a Division I member.
Volume 10: A day in the Big Apple
This past weekend we played New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, N.J.. This four-game series wrapped up our regular season.
The first game started out great for us. Josh Lagein led off the game with a home run to get things started in what turned out to be a four-run first inning. That is all the run support Zac Salfer would need as he only allowed one run for the game. We added a few more runs to the board and won the series opener 10-1.
Day two was a different story. Our bats fell cold in the first game of the day. NJIT jumped out early and put up three runs in the first two innings. We were able to put up two runs of our own in the fifth, but this would be all the runs we could get across. We dropped game two of the series 4-2.
The second game of the day would be a tough one for us to swallow. We had a 4-1 lead in the seventh and added three more runs in that inning, giving us a six-run cushion. This would not hold for long though. After a few scattered hits and a couple of defensive miscues, the score was tied up at seven at the end of the inning. We were unable to get anything going in the next two innings. NJIT eventually won the game on a walk off single in the bottom of the ninth.
In the final game of the regular season we were looking to get back on track heading into the conference tournament. We did just that behind a strong pitching performance from David Lind. He held the Highlanders offense down and only surrendered two runs and we took the game 8-2.
Our plane did not leave until Monday so that gave us an off day on Sunday. We took advantage of this by hitting up New York City. We went to Times Square and were able to explore the area. Many of us saw most of the sights such as Rockefeller Building, Trump building, all of Times Square, Central Park and many other things Manhattan had to offer. It was fun to be able to see all of these sights as for most of us it was our first time in NYC.
Now we are off to play in the conference tournament in Edinburg, Texas. We are the No. 5 seed in the tournament. The other teams in our bracket include No. 4 seed Houston Baptist, No. 1 seed Utah Valley and No. 8 seed Chicago State. The tournament is set up with two brackets and a round-robin format. The winner of each bracket with then meet in the Championship on Saturday.
