Tulane’s baseball team has been enjoying yet another dominant season, ranking third in the tightly-packed American Athletic Conference with an 11-6 record. In fact, the Green Wave was first in the AAC before last weekend, when the team dropped three games to the University of California Santa Barbara with scores of 4-7, 7-8, and 6-16 at home.

Several players have proved their mettle this season, including junior Kody Hoese, who has led the team with his .740 slugging percentage. Redshirt sophomore Kobi Owen is another player to watch, with 18 RBI and 16 walks so far. Pitcher and redshirt senior Kaleb Roper has impressed on the mound, notching 25 strikeouts and holding opponents to a .231 batting average.

Tulane also boasts the seventh best batting average in the nation at .332 and is the first team in the AAC to reach double-digit wins.

Highly-ranked East Carolina University (12-6) joins Tulane on the upper half of the conference standings after a four-game win streak last weekend. Freshman Alec Burleson is sporting an insane .469 batting percentage in the 16 games he has played and started, along with 13 RBI and a .688 slugging percentage. In addition, ECU’s pitchers have been fairly impressive, with multiple players having double-digit punchouts.

The University of Central Florida Knights (11-5) are first in the AAC, after dropping two of three games against Penn State University last weekend. This season, the Knights have recorded 11 games with double digit strikeouts. Standout players on UCF include redshirt senior Tyler Osik, who currently holds a 12-game on-base streak and just notched his 16th multi-RBI game at UCF. Redshirt sophomore Ray Alejo boasts a .317 batting average and a .556 slugging percentage.

Following Tulane in the rankings at fourth is the University of Connecticut (7-6), which just finished an away series with two wins in three games at Texas State University. On Saturday, the Huskies played their longest game in terms of innings since 2017, which coincidentally was in a 5-6 loss in 12 innings to Tulane last April.

Rounding out the rest of the conference is 5th seeded University of Houston (8-7), 6th seeded University of Memphis (8-7), 7th seeded USF (7-7), 8th seeded Wichita State University (6-9), and bottom-ranked University of Cincinnati (5-10).

Overall, although many AAC teams struggled last weekend, several have had encouraging seasons so far and the standings are very close. Hopefully Tulane can come out swinging next week and regain the top seed.

The Green Wave will next play the University of California Riverside for a three-day weekend from March 15-18.