The Alabama State baseball team returns to Southwestern Athletic Conference play with a three-game weekend series against Alcorn State at the Wheeler-Watkins Baseball Complex.
Saturday's doubleheader and Sunday's single game begin at 1 p.m. Bamastatesports.com will have live stats of all three games.
The Hornets are coming off a 13-1 Wednesday night home loss to UAB in which Alabama State made two errors in a game for the first time in 10 games, and had miscues offensively both at the plate and in base running.
"Games like Wednesday are great teaching tools for things we need to improve on, especially throughout the year that you don't have a lot of time to practice," head coach
Mervyl Melendez said. "I saw some weaknesses in our base running and in our game management, and doing the little things we had done well early in the season. However, it came down to execution and understanding why it needs to be executed in the best way. When you start overthinking it and not do it as we've talked about, it comes back to hurt you and it created big innings against us."
Alabama State (12-4 overall, 4-0 SWAC) worked to shore those things and more during practice sessions over the past two days.
"We were able to work on things I thought we needed improvement on," Melendez said. "We addressed a lot of what we failed to do Wednesday, along with our approach at the plate and what we are trying to do, and have everyone to establish their role and understand it."
The matchups with Alcorn State (1-9, 1-2) have been intense since Melendez became the Hornets' head coach. The Braves had a pair of come-from-behind wins against Alabama State and Melendez knows what Alcorn brings into this weekend's series.
 "They've had great series against us in the two years we've been here," Melendez said. "We know the passion they bring to the game, and they play hard all nine innings. We had two games last year where we thought we had won, where we had a six-run lead and a five-run lead late in the ball game, and they came back to win. It is important for us to understand what they bring, that we have to play nine innings, and to play hard. We can't take any opponent lightly, regardless of their record. They've played good opponents (Oklahoma St, Arizona) early on. We need to get back to playing with energy and a lot of passion."
