The Cougar baseball team wasn’t perfect on Monday night against New Mexico State, but you couldn’t tell from the final score.

The Cougars (18-17, 5-10 Pac-12) trampled the Aggies (4-28-1, 1-10-1 WAC) 11-1, but some mental errors on the defensive side held the team back from reaching its full potential.

Head coach Donnie Marbut was seen giving a passionate post-game speech to his players. He said that as a coach who is leading such a young, inexperienced group, he has to be constantly teaching them how to play the game the right way. He thinks his post-game speech wasn’t negative, but merely honest about their performance on Monday.

“I still thought on the defensive end we’ve been sloppy,” Marbut said. “We’ve had a chance to sweep the last two series and our defense let us down at Cal Game 3, and our defense let us down Game 3 against Washington.”

But this game was still an impressive performance.

The Cougars kept their hot hitting streak going by picking up 13 hits. The star of the night was sophomore outfielder Cameron Frost, who blasted a three-run home run over the right-field wall in the fourth inning.

It was Frost’s second homer of the season, and it was the highlight of a huge five-run fourth inning. Frost also picked up an RBI single in the first inning to tie the game. He said the team knew the NMSU pitchers would be throwing away from the batters, which helped him to pick up hits.

“Lefty working away on righties, I knew they were going to pitch away to all the righties and they did,” Frost said. “It just felt good, I was confident and everything.”

The game started off poorly for the Cougars as freshman starting pitcher Scotty Sunitsch allowed a leadoff home run to NMSU outfielder Qunnton Mack. But the young pitcher did not lose confidence in himself, and went on to pitch 3.2 innings, giving up only four more hits, no runs and recording four strikeouts.

The young pitcher pointed to the performance of one of the team’s veteran leaders, Joe Pistorese, as an example of how to respond when faced with adversity.

“It was kind of like what Pisotrese did the other day against UW, where you give up one early, you just got to show you can earn the right to be out there and fight back,” Sunitsch said.

Sunitsch left the game in the fourth inning after the Aggies managed to get the bases loaded with two outs. Senior pitcher Sam Triece came in and struck out NMSU’s Mack to get out of the jam and preserve the Cougars’ two-run lead.

By the end of that five-run inning, the Cougars were up 8-1. The extra run insurance, paired with some recent injuries to WSU players, allowed coach Marbut to send some fresh faces to the plate. Freshman outfielder Daniel Fredrickson, first basemen Cole Johnson, and second basemen Haakon Lande all had multiple at bats in Monday’s game.

And although coach Marbut was honest about his team’s shortcomings, he still praised his players after the game, and said they have grown immensely since conference play started.

“All the credit goes to the players, because the more they play the better they get,” Marbut said.

The Cougars will continue out-of-conference play this weekend as they host San Jose State for a four-game series. Game 1 is scheduled to start at 6 p.m. on Thursday at Bailey-Brayton field.