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Start To Baseball Season Feels Like Winter League, Home Series Moved To Lexington, S.C.

The beginning of this season feels more like Winter League.
The beginning of this season feels more like Winter League. Photo courtesy App State Athletics

By Jesse Wood

This weather continues to muddle the beginning of Appalachian State University’s baseball season, which one week ago.

On Thursday, the university’s athletics department announced that this weekend’s series versus Canisius, which was initially slated to be home games, has been moved to Lexington, S.C., because of inclement weather.

Originally a four-game series over three days at Beaver Field at Jim and Bettie Smith Stadium in Boone, the series will now consist of a doubleheader on Saturday and an afternoon game on Sunday.

The games will be played at Lexington Sports Complex, located at 501 Ball Park Road in Lexington. The doubleheader starts at noon, and Sunday’s game begins at 4 p.m.

While baseball – at least on the professional level anyway – is thought of as a spring to fall sport, the college baseball season is underway during the heart of winter.

App State rolls into the series 1-1, while Canisius, a private college based in Buffalo, N.Y., is 2-2.

Since beginning the season on Feb. 13, the Appalachian State Mountaineers has missed just as many games because of wintry weather as it has played – two.

The season started off with the Mountaineers losing to Davidson after the team squandered a 3-0 lead in the bottom of the eighth and eventually lost 5-3. Davidson scored all five runs in a dreadful eighth inning, where four App State pitchers tossed five walks, hit a batter and threw a wild pitch.

In its next matchup on Valentine’s Day, the Appalachian State’s pitching staff redeemed itself against Villanova. In eight innings, four pitchers – Dallas DeVrieze, Taylor Thurber, Travis Holden and Ryan Ross – gave up only four hits and didn’t allow an earned run.

The Mountaineers went on to beat Villanova 5-2 to earn its first win of the season.

Since then, however, the last two scheduled games have been cancelled. The Mountaineers’ Sunday matchup against N.C. State was cancelled because of winter-weather forecasts, and Tuesday’s game versus Campbell was postponed because of snowy conditions.

And those two games were to be played down the mountain!