WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 2017 | SERVING TEXAS A&M SINCE 1893 | © 2017 STUDENT MEDIA | @THEBATTONLINE
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The Aggies have won all four games Corbin Martin has started in 2017, and he has racked up 23 strikeouts in those starts.
THE BATTALION | THEBATT.COM
Lawrence Smelser — THE BATTALION
Martin tapping into his potential after joining starting rotation By Heath Clary @Heath_Clary
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t’s no secret Corbin Martin has an electric arm. Texas A&M head coach Rob Childress said at the beginning of the season that Martin has one of the most beautiful throwing motions of all the pitchers he’s ever coached.
Every time A&M outfielder Walker Pennington sees someone from another team hitting against Martin, he thanks his lucky stars that he’s a senior and won’t ever have to face Martin again in a preseason scrimmage or practice. Pennington swears he has struck out in each of his last 10 at-bats against Martin and sometimes feels sorry for others who have to step into the box against him. “For a right-hander it’s just devastating. You know he has the stuff, and it seems like he throws eight different pitches,” Pennington said. “Sometimes he doesn’t even know what it’s going to do — most of the time he
does — but he’s got a cutter, a slider, a curveball, a 2-seam and it’s all hard.” Martin, a 6-foot-2, 200-pound righthander from Cypress, entered the season with high expectations as the Aggies’ closer. He had scouts drooling after he pitched to a 1.15 ERA in 14 appearances against some of college baseball’s best hitters in the Cape Cod League, widely recognized as the preeminent summer league in the country. He built on that success in the fall, where he pitched so well that D1Baseball.com’s Kendall Rogers called him the best pitcher he saw from all the schools he visited in the fall.
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His season got off to a rough start, though. He was blowing up radar guns with an explosive fastball registering in the high 90s, but he was erratic and continued to battle the inconsistency that had plagued him throughout his first two seasons in Aggieland. After he surrendered a walk-off grand slam against Baylor in the Minute Maid Classic, his ERA rose to an unsightly 9.72. Childress took him from the closer’s role and moved him to middle relief, and Martin began to churn out quality outing after quality outing. He made a concerted effort to dial back his MARTIN ON PG. 3
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Alex Sein — THE BATTALION
Aggie researchers use charged plates to control the heating for a pore-like chamber in an attempt to reproduce lava lamp-like activity.
FILE
Texas Senate passed a bill to limit tuition increase for affordable higher education.
A&M researchers Senate passes bill A C A D E M I C P E E R S to limit increasing develop alternate tuition rates theory for creation Texas legislature passes bill to of Earth’s lifeforms Jeff, Josh Anderle talk benefits of keep tuition rates tied to inflation Jenny Hollowell — THE BATTALION
University studies senior Jeff Anderle and his son Josh Anderle both attend school in the B-CS area.
attending school at the same time
By Alex Sein @alexandrsein A team of researchers at A&M has been working on an alternative theory for how life developed on Earth, and it could affect the way scientists look for extraterrestrial life on other worlds. A team led by Victor Ugaz, associate professor of chemical engineering, sought to uncover how the organic molecules in Earth’s early oceans could have become concentrated enough to combine and form the first lifeforms, since, on average, the oceans did not have a high enough concentration of these particles. According to Ugaz, the answer can be explained by lava lamps on a microscopic scale. “You heat a fluid from below with a light bulb, and then it causes a density change,” Ugaz said. “The fluid near the bottom is warmer, so it’s lighter, and it rises, and then the fluid near the top is cooler, so it sinks.” Lava lamps, according to Ugaz, are designed to maintain a constant flow of liquid inside them. But this was difficult to replicate on the microscopic scale, and according to Yuncheng Yu, a chemical engineering senior on the team, it took years to do. “The previous Ph.D. student — he actually did some computational simulation,” Yu said. “I’m more the experimental side, to use the experimental results to prove what he did from the EARLY LIFE ON PG. 2
By Abbie Maier @abbsmaier Jeff and Josh Anderle are taking father-son bonding to a whole new level. Father and long-established Aggie Jeff Anderle is working to complete the degree he began at Texas A&M 28 years ago alongside his son Josh, who is a first-semester student at Blinn College. Jeff is an original member of the Class of 1991 and will graduate from the College of Liberal Arts in 2017, while Josh plans to graduate from A&M in 2021. Although in different stages of their lives, the pair is able to share their love of learning and of A&M. The Anderle family returned to Bryan-College Station in December of 2015 to start a church in the area, after 17 years of living in Tennessee. “We felt led to come back here and start a church in College Station. When we first decided to do that, we checked if I could finish my degree. That was the first thing I wanted to do,” Jeff said. “I bleed maroon. I love A&M. Not finishing bothered me, so when I had the opportunity I came back and now I’m finishing it up.”
Jeff has been involved in ministry for 27 years, beginning when he first joined Young Life in College Station, a Christian ministry focused on high school students, and became the youth pastor at A&M United Methodist Church during his early years of college. “I was a little bit more invested in doing ministry than I was in school. So the last semester of my junior year, I ended up going on academic probation,” Jeff said. “I transferred to a little Methodist college up in Shreveport, Louisiana my senior year to get a certification in youth ministry, and had left this degree undone.” Josh graduated high school a year early and is almost finished with his first semester at Blinn. He said he enjoys having his family nearby during his endeavors in higher education. “It feels normal to me — the difference is I don’t have to pay rent. I was homeschooled all the way up to high school. When I started going to high school, my mom started teaching there and my dad started substituting there,” Josh said. “My last semester in high school, I was actually in Chattanooga and they were here. So I got a taste of what it’s like to be away from family, and I didn’t like it.” Despite being interested in separate topics, both Jeff and Josh have enjoyed the classes they’ve taken at A&M and at ANDERLE ON PG. 2
By Tyler Snell @Tyler_Snell2 College students are facing a struggle much larger than their next exam these days — they are battling the ever rising costs of higher education, too. A week ago, the Texas Senate passed Senate Bill 19, which aims to limit increasing tuition at public universities and connect future increases to performance measures. Senator Charles Schwertner proposed an amendment that will limit future tuition increases to no more than one percent over the rate of inflation. The amendment passed with a 20-11 vote. “This change will restore a measure of accountability to higher education and ensure that a college education remains affordable and accessible for all Texas students,” Schwertner said in a statement after the adoption of the bill. “As most people know, I have been a vocal advocate of slowing tuition growth for many years and was extremely pleased to see such strong support for this issue in the Texas Senate.” According to a report by U.S. News and World Report, in-state tuition and fees at public universities grew by 296 percent in the 20 year span from 1995 to 2015. The average cost of tuition in 1995 was $2,475.76 compared to $9,803.03 in 2015. “Capping tuition at something close to the rate of inflation means that tuition will have to TUITION ON PG. 2