Teeming with pride, the UNM baseball team was still, apparently, making a Texas toast to themselves.
Briefly, the Lobos dawdled with Northern Colorado, a team they beat handily last season by a combined three-game score of 46-9.
In the end, it cost UNM dearly.
Missing out on a four-game sweep, the Lobos took three games from the Bears, storming to an eighth-inning comeback in which they scored all seven runs on Friday to win 7-5, before notching a 5-2 victory in the first leg of Saturday’s doubleheader. The second leg, though, was decidedly
different. UNM lost 6-5, setting the stage for an angry drubbing on Sunday, in which the Lobos battered Northern Colorado 13-5.
Still, in a game that needed 10 innings to settle on Saturday, the Lobos stranded runners, leaving the bases juiced, while grounding into a double play to seal their fate, 6-5.
Afterward, Ray Birmingham slammed down the iron-fisted hammer in the locker room.
“Despite the flu, I gave them everything I had,” he said. “I can’t tell you (what I said). It might have made Bobby Knight blush, let me tell you that.”
Whatever the Lobos’ head coach barked, it worked. The Lobos jumped on the Bears early, opening up an 3-0 first-inning lead on the bats of Rafael Neda, Chris Juarez and Kenny Held.
With the help of a four-run fifth inning, the Lobos held a 10-2 lead.
On the mound, Bobby Mares, in his first appearance of the season, went five innings, faced 21 batters, struck out three and only allowed three hits and two runs. Mares’ only mistake came in the top of the third, when he gave up a solo home run to Tyler Borzileri.
Mares said he couldn’t have asked for a better opening-season performance.
“Besides the home run I gave up, no,” he said, explaining what happened on that offering. “I tried to get a strike and I threw it right over the middle of the plate, and he crushed it.”
For the better part of the day that was the only mistake the Lobos made. This was probably because, Mares said, UNM didn’t want to have to endure another speech-from-hell session in the locker room.
Alluding to the ear-pounding speech Birmingham laid on some Lobos’ virgin ears after Saturday’s letdown, Mares said, maybe UNM didn’t take the Bears seriously enough.
“We haven’t played well since Texas. (Northern Colorado) competed all four games,” he said. “We didn’t really compete the first three games but we ended up winning. To come out hot, right off the bat — we needed that.”
Mares said he and the Lobos would rather learn that lesson early in the season than later.
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“We can’t just expect to show and beat everybody we play,” he said. “Last year, I heard they just destroyed them. Maybe we thought it’d be the same thing. Maybe we thought we could just show up and beat them.”
The Lobos sprayed 20 hits on Sunday, but Birmingham said, overall, some of his hitters were impatient throughout the course of the four-game series.
“Early in the season, when you have a young club, everybody’s trying to hard to hit, and the pitchers are just trying to get you out,” Birmingham said. “No matter how much you practice, they get emotional to start the season. It’s like Christmas morning with 8-year olds. They scatter all the presents. If you don’t grab, they’ll rip them up, throw the stuff everywhere.”
Birmingham conceded that, though the Bears “can beat Pac 10 teams,” UNM should probably have swept the Bears.
Still, he said, it was a good lesson.
“Do I want to win all of them? Yes,” Birmingham said. “A loss sometimes is good. I thought that one was good. Obviously, it pissed them off.”
