The 1972 Season

1972 Trinity baseball roster. From 1972 Mirage Yearbook.

Early in the 1972 season, the Tiger ball club, while winning games, did not look like the playoff team they ended up becoming. The team began the year with a 5 and 3 record, but by the end of the season, the Tigers were sporting a 32 and 6 record. This included a historic twenty-two game winning streak entering the NCAA playoffs. The team undoubtedly went into the playoffs with momentum, having just defeated rival Pan American to end the season and extend their winning streak to 22. On top of that, the first matchup of the double elimination playoffs was against Pan America. In their first playoff game the Tigers fell to Pan American by a score of 6 to 1. Trinity’s starting pitcher Paul Stanley threw well for eight and a third innings, before Coach Houston Wheeler took him out due to fatigue. The Tiger pitching staff then imploded, giving up six runs in the ninth. The Tiger offense was not capable of making the comeback in the ninth, and the Tigers were sent to an elimination game against the powerhouse University of Texas Longhorns. After a draining loss in the morning, the Tigers played a 14 inning, 4 hour and 15-minute war of attrition, that the Longhorns came out on top of, 4 to 3. The Tigers had their chances to secure a victory however, leading by scores of 1 to 0 and 3 to 2, but could never put the Longhorns away. Texas scored in the bottom of the 11^th inning to tie the game 3 to 3 and scored again in the 14^th to win the ballgame. The Tigers undoubtedly experienced some misfortune, as Paul Batista described a situation in extra innings when the Tigers had loaded the bases and a Tiger batsman hit a line drive down the first base line that should have gotten down for a hit. However, the first baseman was holding on the runner at first, an unorthodox position. Batista noted, “If he’d have been playing where he should have been, we would have scored two, maybe three runs and probably won the game” (Batista). Despite the misfortune that they experienced, it surely was not the cleanest game from the Tiger squad, as there were a few key errors that likely cost Trinity the game. Paul Batista recalled an instance late in the game, when the Trinity had the bases loaded and the pitcher baserunning, “and they picked him off second base” (Batista). Batista also touched on what could have been if they had pulled of a win against Texas, saying, “We had four really good pitchers, so we would have been in a really good place had we won either of those games. Unfortunately, we didn’t” (Batista). While the 1972 season ended on a sour note with the Tigers feeling like they had more left to prove, the 1973 team brought back most of the same players, including all of 1972’s key pieces.