RIVERSIDE, Calif. – The UC Riverside Highlanders Baseball team will play 55 games throughout its 2020 season, with 27 of those contests slated to take place at home at the Riverside Sports Complex on the campus of UC Riverside.
The Highlanders will kick off their 2020 campaign on the road with a three-game series at UCLA, (currently ranked 14th in the preseason polls), February 14-16, and will open up at home on February 19 with a single night game against Seattle University.
The Highlanders will race Cal Baptist in a three-game series, February 21-23, in the latest edition of the “Crosstown Showdown” where they will play the first and last game at Cal Baptist while the Lancers will visit the Highlanders for the middle game at the Riverside Sports Complex. The two teams will meet again in late April to play for a fourth time.
On Tuesday, February 25, UNLV will travel to Southern California’s Inland Empire to take on UCR for one game before the Highlanders travel to north to Moraga, Calif., to play the Saint Mary’s College Gaels in another three-game series, February 28-March 1.
The Highlanders next travel to nearby Loyola Marymount University (LMU) for a game on March 3 before they host their longest series of the season, March 5-8, where they will play Holy Cross for four games in four days.
Following the Holy Cross series, the teams hits the road again, for travel to Bakersfield for a three-game series (March 13-15) against CSU Bakersfield, who will be entering the Big West as a conference opponent in 2021. The Highlanders will squeeze in one home game against Washington State on March 18th before wrapping up their non-conference slate with three games at home against the University of New Mexico, March 21-23.
Talking about the season ahead, Head Coach Troy Percival stated, “We are excited about our 2020 schedule. We open up with a tough non-conference schedule that should prepare us well for the competition within the Big West Conference.”
The Highlanders will open up Big West Conference play on the road against Cal State Fullerton the last weekend of March in the standard three games in three days format. The following Tuesday, March 31, they will face University of San Diego (USD) for one of two games they will play against the Toreros this season.
The team’s will open their home conference schedule with a series against Long Beach State, April 3—5, before traveling to San Diego on the following Tuesday to wrap up their series against USD. They remain on the road that weekend, traveling to Irvine, April 9-10 to face UC Irvine in another three-game conference series.
The Highlanders will return home for a single game against visiting LMU on April 14 and continue Big West play with a three-game home series against UC Davis, April 17-19.
The following week they return to the road for another Big West series against UC Santa Barbara, April 24-26. Then, the team will be back in Riverside to host Cal Baptist for a single game on April 28 and CSUN for three games May 1-3.
On May 5, the Highlanders will travel across the Southern California desert into Nevada to take on UNLV on May 5, before closing out their away Conference schedule against the University of Hawai’i, May 8-10. The team’s final conference series of the season at home will be against Cal Poly, May 15-17, before hitting the road one final time for a three-game set against current pre-season top 10 ranked, Arizona State.
