Thursday, February 26, 2015
PORTLAND, Ore. – Montana State Billings' Luke Reinschmidt was named the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Associations National Player of the Week Wednesday.
Reinschmidt becomes just the second player in GNAC history to record this honor, joining former Western Oregon and D2baseballnews.com National Pitcher of the Year, Grady Wood.
In eight games last week the centerfielder hit .364 with three doubles, one triple and four home runs in 12 hits. Reinschmidt played a part in almost a quarter of the 57 runs scored by MSUB in series against Azusa Pacific, Dixie State and Minot State.
"This is a great honor for Luke and our program," MSUB head coach Rob Bishop said. "He deserves this honor with the week that he put together on the road."
The Yellowjacket junior won GNAC Player of the Week and the NCBWA West Region Player of the Week honors before his national selection.
Reinschmidt and the Yellowjackets top-ranked offense will start conference play this weekend, facing the GNAC’s best pitching team in Central Washington.
The Wildcats are holding batters to a .203 average in their eight games played so far while striking out a whopping 9.74 batters each contest.
The Yellowjackets counter this with a GNAC-best .320 batting average while leading the conference in every major hitting category including slugging percentage, on-base percentage, hits, runs scored and home runs.
In a rematch of the opening game of the 2014 GNAC tournament, Saint Martin’s hosts Western Oregon in its first conference series of the year.
The Saints are coming off their first sweep of the year, against Concordia, while the Wolves recently took two games from Lewis-Clark State, the second-ranked team in the NAIA.
Northwest Nazarene has another week before it begins conference play. The Crusaders are preparing for next seasons conference schedule in the meantime by visiting 2016 GNAC foe, Concordia, Friday and Saturday.
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