El Paso buries Round Rock with five-run innings, 14-3 win
El Paso turned one crooked third inning into a 14-3 rout, exposing Round Rock’s pitching issues again after the earlier 23-7 slugfest.
The first warning sign arrived in the third inning, and Round Rock never recovered. Two days after a 23-7 shootout, the Express were buried again by El Paso’s bats in a 14-3 loss at Southwest University Park, where the Chihuahuas stacked five-run frames and turned a series that had already become a scoring frenzy into a study in game-state unraveling.
Marcos Castañon opened the damage with a pinch-hit, two-run double in the third, Nick Solak followed with a hit, and Jase Bowen blasted a three-run homer to make the lead look suddenly enormous. El Paso kept layering on the pressure from there. Anthony Vilar added a solo shot in the fourth, Nate Mondou drove in two more with a fifth-inning homer, Carlos Rodriguez tripled in two runs in that same inning, and Solak later went deep for a two-run homer in the sixth as the Chihuahuas reached season-high territory in runs scored.
Josh Stephan absorbed the beating for Round Rock, allowing 11 earned runs in 4.1 innings in the loss. The outing reinforced a troubling pattern for the Express, who had already seen opponents push past 10 runs on the way to an 0-7 record in those games. They also tied their season high for runs allowed at 14, matching the number El Paso put up against them on April 15 at Dell Diamond.
The roster note that accompanied the rout did little to soften it. Joe Ross made his Round Rock debut after signing with Texas earlier in the day, one day after his release by Arizona. The 33-year-old right-hander, a former first-round pick born May 21, 1993, worked 1.2 innings and allowed three runs as the game quickly slipped out of reach.
Round Rock did get late home runs from Gilberto Celestino, his first with the club, and Nick Pratto, who finished with a two-run shot in the ninth, but by then the result was long settled. El Paso finished with 14 hits and only one error, while Round Rock managed six hits and left seven runners on base. The game drew 7,854 and lasted 2 hours, 39 minutes, a brisk night that still felt like a slog for the Express as they fell to 18-31, 13 games under .500, with the worst start through 49 games in the Triple-A era.
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