The St. Thomas Aquinas College baseball team rallied late to close out their season-opening spring trips with an 8-6 victory over Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina. The Spartans, who slipped to #2 in this week's National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association East Region poll, improve to 10-4 overall while Catawba slipped to 10-15 with the loss.

STAC fell behind when the Indians opened a 2-0 lead with a first-inning home run, and though Juan Adorno answered for the Spartan in the visiting 2nd, Catawba pushed across two more in the 2nd, and one in the 3rd to open a 5-1 lead. The bullpen kept the game within reach as STAC added a run in the 7th with Bobby Morse recording a double and being driven home by Joey Pena.

That set the stage for the Spartans' big 8th-inning rally. Anthony Maisano and Mark Shkrelja both reached on errors to set the table and the visitors took full advantage. Morse and Cris Ruiz followed with back-to-back RBI singles to trim the deficit to 5-4, and one out later, Nicholas Lucchese added another run-scoring hit to tie the score.

East Coast Conference Player of the Week Giovanni Dingcong gave the Spartans their first lead with an RBI double, and Maisano - batting for the second time in the evening, plated a pair of big insurance runs with a two-out single to make the score 8-5. Chris Pennell, Michael Valdez, and Angelo Baez combined to allow one run over 6.2 relief innings, and Frankie Moscatiello yielded a 9th-inning run but still earned the save, with Baez taking the win.

Pena, Lucchese, Maisano, and Morse recorded two hits each in the 12-hit attack, as five STAC pitchers combined to record 11 strikeouts. The Spartans return to action this weekend traveling to face Southern New Hampshire University for a double-header Saturday and a single game Sunday, games which were originally scheduled as home games but were moved due to unplayable field conditions.