Season of high moments ends with 2-loss day

Thursday, May 22

Mesa, Ariz.

8:45 p.m.

Grand Canyon

31-27

UT Arlington

21-32

Grand Canyon

UT Arlington

Photo by: Jayden Todd

5/22/2025 11:32:00 PM | Baseball, Paul Coro

Box Score Photo Gallery

UT Arlington ousts GCU, which lost 7 of 8 after winning series at Stanford

By: Paul Coro

MESA, Ariz. – This season's Grand Canyon baseball team that upset three top-25 teams and went 14-9 against top-100 RPI opponents lost seven of its last eight games.

The Lopes team that ranked among the nation's top 35 for ERA through the first 30 games at 4.15 gave up 10.9 runs per game in that 1-7, season-ending stretch.

Home run finish

It added up to GCU being suddenly subtracted from the WAC Tournament field Thursday night, when the Lopes followed a 7-5 daytime loss to top-seeded Sacramento State by having a 6-2 lead slip into a late-night, 9-7 loss to seventh-seeded UT Arlington at Hohokam Stadium.

The fourth-seeded Lopes (31-27) picked up 14 hits off the Mavericks for the second time this season, but they grounded into three double plays and ended the season with six consecutive outs at the plate to wash away their best bullpen night (3 1/3 shutout innings of one-hit ball by junior right-handers Elijah Higginbottom and Walter Quinn).

"It was a disappointing end," said GCU head coach Gregg Wallis, whose team reached a RPI ranking of No. 48 in mid-April. "Coming out of the Stanford series, we felt like we played so well in the second-to-last week of the year. We had a great year. We beat Arizona and beat Stanford two of three. We were really starting to roll into the end of the year, and then we just hit a wall.

"We didn't quit, though. Every time we got down, we fought back."

Graduate left fielder Michael Diaz put GCU ahead 6-2 with a two-out, three-run home run in the third inning that was the Phoenix native's 11th homer of the season.

The Lopes maintained the lead even as UT Arlington reduced it to 6-4 through four innings. Sophomore right-hander Garrett Ahern was nearly out of the fifth inning when sophomore catcher Marcus Galvan cleared the bases by throwing out a base stealer, a call reversed by video review when it showed sophomore second baseman Troy Sanders adjusting to apply a leg tag on a head-first slide.

The next seven UT Arlington batters reached base on six singles and a walk, including the last four coming on two-strike pitches by Ahern. The five-run inning put the Mavericks ahead 9-6.

"It seemed like we had built some momentum from the reversal," Wallis said. "Then, they strung together a lot of hits in a row – two-strike hits, some were us finding holes. Garrett made some good pitches, and they were able to hit some balls in the holes. Some weren't hit hard, but the strung together enough to score five runs."

Walter Quinn

Higginbottom and Quinn returned from also combining for three quality relief innings in Wednesday's tournament-opening win against Utah Tech.

The GCU bullpen duo shut down UT Arlington for the final 3 1/3 innings Thursday night, including Quinn inheriting runners on second and third with no outs in the bottom of the seventh and escaping unharmed on nine pitches.

The Lopes trimmed the lead to 9-7 in the top of the seventh inning when junior first baseman Cael Boever, limited by injury this season, finished a 4-for-7 tournament with a RBI ground out.

After sophomore first baseman Cannon Peery's leadoff eighth-inning single, GCU did not hit again. Peery had a 3-for-4 game, including a RBI double and paired with Sanders' two-run single for a three-run second inning.

UT Arlington first baseman Caylon Dygert snagged junior shortstop Emilio Barreras' smashed line drive to start the top of the ninth, which lasted six pitches.
Cannon Peery

"That's baseball for you," said Barreras, who ended the season on a 10-game hitting streak of .409 batting. "Not everything goes your way ever. That's what makes this game absolutely beautiful. It humbles you in many ways. A lot of life lessons.

"Playoff baseball, anything can happen. We knew we needed to keep stepping on the gas, but not everything goes your way."

GCU had been 12-4 this season when collecting 12 hits or more. But three rally-killing double plays brought the Lopes' season total of grounding into double plays to 52, their most in a season since the statistic began being tracked in 1998.

"Those hurt us," Wallis said. "We hit into three in pretty big spots that gave them some momentum and allowed their pitcher to get going."

WAC Tournament mound huddle

The Lopes wound up in the 8:45 p.m. elimination game after falling 7-5 to the tournament's No. 1 seed, Sacramento State, on Saturday afternoon, when a three-run Hornets fifth inning was pivotal. An arm issue that sidelined GCU senior reliever Gray Bailey earlier in the year resurfaced when he opened the inning with a four-pitch walk, first-pitch hit batsman and single.

"He felt something in the first or second hitter and tried to pitch through it," Wallis said. "We could clearly see something was wrong. The game plan was good, but we didn't account for him being injured. That was difficult to have the arm flare up again at the wrong time."

GCU left the tying runs on bases with nobody out in the ninth inning to lose the day game, prompting a crosstown return to campus and late-night return to Hohokam.

Since winning the 2021 WAC Tournament, GCU went 4-8 in the conference tourney games at Hohokam despite two of those Lopes teams reaching an NCAA regional anyway.

"Not everything went our way this season, but we can definitely take those things into next year, as well as in life and how you approach everything and how you work," Barreras said. "It's just a different perspective."

GCU will await the impact of the MLB Draft and ponder its upcoming switch to the Mountain West Conference as it prepares returning players for summer ball and assembles a roster for fall ball.

"We are going to lose a lot of guys that played a lot of games, mostly offensively," Wallis said. "We have some sophomores on the mound that showed big improvement, and we have older guys who will be back on the mound who we'll figure out a development plan to get better.

"We had a split between older, veteran guys and had three or four sophomores on any given day in their first year starting in Division I baseball. Hopefully, that experience for them is big coming back."