Maryland baseball assistant coach Matt Brady took a seat on the first base side of Bob “Turtle” Smith Stadium during the third inning of Maryland’s game against Delaware Wednesday.

He muttered to himself, “I smell a hit” as catcher Tavan Shahidi led off the inning. Brady was right, as Shahidi launched a solo home run to left-center field, giving Maryland a 3-0 lead. 

The Terps scored three more in the inning, storming out to a 6-0 lead as Maryland bounced back from a weekend sweep at Coastal Carolina, defeating the Blue Hens 13-6.

Maryland and Delaware have a recent history of high-scoring games — the two combined to score 34 runs in their two games in 2019, and 21 runs in their two games in 2018.

Wednesday’s game was no different, as the teams put 19 on the board. But it looked like the Terps were going to make quick work of the Blue Hens through three innings. The Terps, who scored a total of five runs against Coastal Carolina over the weekend, scored six in their first three innings. 

Maxwell Costes and Randy Bednar each drove home a run in the first two innings, giving Maryland it’s first lead since last Tuesday against George Mason.

The third inning was the big inning Maryland was looking for. It started with the Shahidi home run. From there, Ben Cowles drove two home with a double into the left-center field gap. Once again, the hit-by-pitch bug came back to help Maryland as Maxwell Costes recorded an RBI hit-by-pitch to put the Terps ahead 6-0.

Then, the Blue Hens began to fight back, scoring five in two innings, the first coming on a Joseph Carpenter RBI groundout, followed by an Aidan Riley two-run single, cutting the Terps’ lead to 6-3.

In the fifth, a Shahidi throwing error and an RBI double from Carpenter, his second is as many innings, cut that 6-0 lead down to 6-5.

That was as close as Delaware would get, as Maryland outscored them 7-1 in the final four innings, including multi-run innings in the sixth and seventh. 

Zach Thompson took the mound for the Terps as their de-facto midweek starter and was perfect through three innings. He ended up throwing 4.1 innings, but gave up five earned runs after leaving a few on the bases when he departed.

Maryland needed four pitchers to get through the game. Once Thompson departed, Sean Heine came in, giving up two hits in 1.2 scoreless innings, though he allowed several runners he inherited to score in the fifth. Connor Staine and Elliot Zoellner finished the job, Zoellner throwing two one-hit innings to close out the game. 

Four Terps had multi-hit games and six reached base at least twice. Every Maryland hitter reached base at least once, and eight of the nine starters recorded a hit. 

In a back-and-forth game, Maryland found a way to manufacture runs with ease and it was a big win moving forward into an important series this weekend against Bryant.