ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – The University of New Mexico baseball team, winners of three straight and off to a 7-2 start, are close to cracking the Top 25 according to college baseball website D1Baseball.com. It listed the Lobos among the other 10 teams it considered for this week’s poll.
UNM defeated San Francisco 4-3 in walk-off fashion Saturday evening and then crushed Utah Valley 9-3 Sunday afternoon in a game that wasn’t even as close as the final score indicates. The Lobos have yet to have a losing weekend this season.
They began the year with three wins in four days in Surprise, Ariz., including a pair of wins over Oregon State, which has lost just one other game thus far. In fact, D1Baseball national writer Aaron Fitt said in a weekly chat that despite being 8-3 and having some impressive stats and wins, the Beavers are behind the Lobos in the pecking order due to those two losses.
UNM then fought off Mother Nature to earn four wins the last two weekends. The Lobos took two out of three from Air Force to open Mountain West play after the teams were forced to move the series to Albuquerque due to snow in Colorado Springs. Then this past weekend snow forced the cancellations of two games, but they responded with back-to-back wins Saturday and Sunday.
The Lobos have yet to play their best baseball, or anything close to it, but have been doing enough to pull out some tough wins. They face a huge test this weekend with another team that is close to cracking the Top 25 coming to town in San Diego State (11-1).