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Baseball resumes Big East play with Georgetown

Following wins in four of their last five games, the baseball team will host a three-game tilt against Georgetown.

The Pirates took two of three from No. 24 Houston last week­end and returned home for a 4-2 win against Iona.

Head coach Rob Sheppard's club has scored 42 runs in their past five games, despite being shut-out in the second game of the Houston series.

This high powered offense has the Hall ranked in the top five in the Big East in some major offen­sive categories.

They rank third in the Big East in team slugging percentage and fourth in triples with 15.

Seton Hall's success has truly come from a reliance on speed and small ball, not impressive displays of power.

"That's our style of play," Sheppard said. "We want to put as much pressure as we can on the defense and the best way to do that is to get guys on base. We've been really successful when we get as many guys on base and get the next guy up."

Speed has been an effective tool for the Pirates, who rank second in the Big East in stolen bases. Junior Zack Granite leads the team with 23 steals which is second in the conference.

The Pirates' upcoming series with Georgetown marks their re­turn to Big East play since win­ning a three-game series on the road against Rutgers on April 7. Sheppard is excited for the week­end series with the Hoyas, a team that he claims always gives the Hall a tough game.

"It'll be a battle, you know, Georgetown's a good team," Sheppard said. "Conference play is always a tight game so we're looking forward to it."

The Hoyas hold an overall re­cord of 21-13, but are 4-5 in con­ference play. The are currently one game behind the Hall in the Big East standings.

They have hit a bit of a slump recently, going 3-4 in their last seven, including a 20-1 loss to St. John's in their last conference game.

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Georgetown will have to clash with some hot hitting from some players in the Seton Hall lineup. Granite is hitting .346, leading the club with 47 hits, 21 walks and 35 runs scored. Senior Giuseppe Pa­paccio went 3-4 on Wednesday, bringing his average to .338.

The Hoyas will also run into Seton Hall's ace, Jon Prosinski. Prosinski is 5-2 with a 2.59 ERA and 52 strikeouts over nine starts. In his last start against Houston, Prosinski struck out nine in eight innings while only allowing one run on seven hits.

With both the offense and pitching staff finding a groove in the middle of the season, Shep­pard does not fear his team will take their foot off the gas and be­come complacent.

"You just got to show up to the park every day, we can't worry about the games that we've played or that are in front of us," Sheppard said. "We just got to worry about our performance on that given day and show up to the park ready to play."

The series will begin Friday night at 6 p.m. at Owen T. Carroll Field and will continue on Satur­day and Sunday each at 1 p.m.

Gerard Gilberto can be reached at gerard.gilberto@stu­dent.shu.edu.


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