Game 1 Box Score / Game 2 Box Score

PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. — Winning games have been the easy part thus far for the Saint Mary's University baseball team.

It's been the start times and travel that have been the difficult part.

SMU opened its season with a pair of nonconference wins over Valley City State on March 3 in a doubleheader that started at 9:45 p.m. on a Thursday night and ended in the wee hours of Friday morning.

Sunday afternoon, the Cardinals continued their season-opening winning ways with an 8-6 win over Albertus Magnus in a game in which the Cardinals traveled 27 hours on bus to get there.

There were no late-game heroics in Game 2, however, as SMU let a 2-0 fourth-inning lead slip away as the Falcons erupted for seven runs in the sixth inning en route to an 8-2 win.

"All in all, it was a good day of baseball," said SMU coach Nick Whaley, whose team moved to 3-1 with the split. "It wa great to see us come back in that first game, we never gave up, we just kept battling.

"That second game just got away from us — it wasn't that we played poorly, we just gave up a few bloop hits, made a couple of mistakes, and things got away from us."

The Game 1 win was anything but easy for the Cardinals, who jumped out to a 3-0 advantage in the second inning — thanks in large part to a two-run single off the bat of Pat Jacobsen (Stillwater, Minn.) — only to give up a single run in the bottom of the third, three more in the fifth and two in the sixth to fall behind 6-3 heading into their final at-bat.

And what an at-bat it was.

SMU got a two-run single from Jacobsen, RBI singles from Dan Cosgrove (South St. Paul, Minn.) and Kevin Black (Mahtomedi, Minn.), and a pair of Albertus Magnus errors to plate five runs — fourth with two outs — to earn the come-from-behind victory.

The Cardinals jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the fourth inning of the second game, as Nick Winecke (St. Paul, Minn.) led off with a single and scored on an RBI single by Brady Knudsen (Racine, Wis.). Knudsen then scored on an RBI groundout by Mark Pederson (Lexington, Minn.).

The Falcons cut the Cardinals' lead to one, 2-1, with a single run in the fifth, then scored seven in the bottom of the sixth — fueled by a three singles, four walks, a pair of wild pitches and a two-run error — in handing SMU its first loss of the season.