KFDM COOP Posted May 22, 2008 Report Posted May 22, 2008 Second loss bumps Rice from C-USA baseball tourney NEW ORLEANS – Fifth-ranked Rice opened the Conference USA tournament on Wednesday afternoon seeking history. The Owls will leave the Crescent City with that mission accomplished, although it wasn’t the sort of history they planned to revisit. For the first time since the 1995 Southwest Conference tournament, Rice went 0-2 in a postseason conference tournament, falling to East Carolina 4-3 at Turchin Stadium. The top-seeded Owls (42-13) dropped back-to-back games for the first time since late-March. No. 5 seed East Carolina (40-18) will meet the Houston-UAB loser on Friday. Rice had won consecutive C-USA tournaments, but after falling to UAB on Wednesday, showed relatively few signs of life against the Pirates. T.J. Hose (6-4), who was demoted as the Friday night starter after struggling out of the gate, picked up the win in relief. The Owls sprang to a 3-0 lead, with Adam Zornes’ two-run home run in the second inning serving as the big blow. However, the Owls squandered opportunities for big innings over their next three at-bats, with J.P. Padron grounding into a double play in the third, Rick Hague getting erased at home plate on a failed safety squeeze bunt in the fourth, and Zornes grounding out with runners on the corners to close the fifth inning. Those failures allowed Pirates starter Justin Bristow to linger for four innings despite his early struggles, and they enabled to Pirates to rally against Rice starter Ryan Berry. Kyle Roller cut the deficit to two runs with a homer to center in the fifth, and the Pirates exploded for three runs on five hits against Berry (7-4) and Cole St. Clair in the sixth.
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