LAKE CHARLES – It was a frustrating weekend visit to McNeese for the Northwestern State baseball team, but in the grand scheme of the Southland Conference standings, it wasn’t that damaging.
The Demons dropped a pair of low-scoring, extra-inning decisions to the Cowboys Thursday night and Friday night, then were whipped Saturday in a shutout loss. But after entering the series with a slim chance to finish second in the Southland, the losses dropped NSU only one spot to a fourth-place tie – ironically, with McNeese, which began the series in seventh place.
For the fifth straight game, dating to the 2025 regular-season series finale in Natchitoches, the Demons and Cowboys played to a razor-thin margin Friday night with McNeese edging Northwestern, 5-4, in 10 innings at Joe Miller Ballpark on Friday night. That came on the heels of an 11-inning, 1-0 loss Thursday night to the Cowboys when starting pitcher Dylan Marionneaux shined. Friday, Kevin Robinson had a career-best outing, taking a shutout into the eighth inning.
“When you’re in search of wins, especially when you’re in search of wins while competing your tail off and playing decent baseball, is the idea you have to find ways to win the game the way the game requires you to win on a given night,” third-year head coach Chris Bertrand said. “If we’re going to play close ball games, then it remains that we’re going to have to – when we have a lead – learn how to hold the lead in the later innings, and when we have opportunities throughout the game to get runs and extend a lead, then we have to do that as well.”
Friday night, the Demons (25-24, 16-14) jumped Eric Nachtsheim – the reigning Southland Conference Pitcher of the Week – for two first-inning runs when Joe Siervo battled his way to a full count before launching a two-run home run to left field to give Northwestern a quick 2-0 lead.
That appeared to be plenty of offensive support for Robinson, the Demons’ junior right-hander, who held the Cowboys (27-23, 16-14) to one run and four hits through a season-long seven-plus innings. Robinson did not walk a batter and struck out six.
“We got a tremendous start from Kevin,” Bertrand said. “What an unbelievable performance. We played really good defense again, and I thought we had a good plan and took some good swings off of an unbelievable starter on their end of it.”
While Nachtsheim settled in after the bumpy first inning to strike out 11 across six innings, the Demons touched him for seven hits but could not extend the lead until the right-hander exited the game after six innings.
Zach White greeted reliever Connor Achee with a sharp single to left to start the Demon seventh inning – a frame that saw Northwestern tack on a pair of runs on Brooks Leonard’s RBI triple and Siervo’s two-out single, his third two-out RBI of the game.
Leonard (3-for-5), Thomas Marsala III (2-for-5) and Siervo (2-for-4) combined for seven of the Demons’ 10 hits in the game.
“The first four hitters in our lineup were really good tonight,” Bertrand said. “That’s where the majority of the hits came from. Those guys had unbelievable at-bats and really helped us drive the pitch count up in some of those early innings. The first four guys were great, and Brooks and Joe were a huge part of that. We’ve just got to get a little bit more of a move-the-ball type of mentality throughout the entire lineup if we hope to put more pressure on our opponents, because, right now, the way the offense is going is that, when we create opportunities, there’s so much pressure on us to cash them in. Right now, it’s almost as though we’re pressuring ourselves instead of using our offense and our offensive weapons to pressure our opponents.”
McNeese, however, rallied in the eighth as Korey Cooper’s leadoff double inside the first-base bag ended Robinson’s day.
Four batters and three hits later, Hayden Stringfellow’s RBI single tied the game at 4 and drove reliever Caleb Muffoletto from the game.
After Achee and Paul Coppinger (2-3) blanked the Demons from the eighth through the 10th innings, the Cowboys put together an extra-inning rally for the second time in as many days. Easton Dowell, who drove in the game-winning run Friday night in the 11th inning, led off the 10th with a double and eventually came around to score the game-winning run on Isaiah Keller’s RBI sacrifice fly to deep center field.
“When you’re in search of wins, you have to have solutions to problems that arise,” Bertrand said. “Today our two solutions were trying to extend the lead and trying to, obviously, hold the lead late, and we didn’t do either one of the solutions today.
The series finished Saturday afternoon as McNeese scored six runs in the first inning, helped along by two NSU errors, and cruised to an 8-0 win.
Northwestern will play Thursday afternoon at 1 in Beaumont, Texas, in the SLC Tournament’s west four-team pod. The survivor of that will play the east pod winner from Hammond for the SLC Tournament title and automatic NCAA Tournament berth the following weekend.