Regardless of the temptation, Louisiana's Ragin' Cajun baseball team won't change its approach this weekend when the Cajuns take the Sun Belt Conference lead into the league's most notorious "launching pad."

The Cajuns (39-10, 11-4) play perhaps the most important series of the regular season's final three weekends beginning tonight when they travel to face New Mexico State (24-20, 9-6) at Presley Askew Field. The teams meet at 7:05 p.m. today and Saturday and at 2:05 p.m. Sunday.

In the last league series played at Presley Askew, the Aggies took three wins over Arkansas State. But it was the scores that made the rest of the league shake its collective heads - 18-16, 21-10 and 15-12.

"Anybody can be a great hitting coach in Las Cruces," said Cajun assistant coach and hitting coach John Szefc, whose hitters rank second in the league behind the Aggies (.321 to .334). "What you don't want to do is try to do things that you haven't done ... start trying to lift the ball out of the park and get it up in the wind."

New Mexico State has 75 team home runs this year, and no one else in the league has more than 45. The Aggies have scored 450 runs in 44 games, more than 10 per game. But NMSU's team earned run average is a sky-high 6.71.

"The numbers are skewed there," said Cajun coach Tony Robichaux. "You never know what kind of game you're going to be in."

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Dan McDonald
dmcdonald@theadvertiser.com