The NIU baseball team saw a 4-1 lead vanish in a 10-7 loss to Eastern Illinois on Wednesday afternoon at Ralph McKinzie Field.

The Huskies (16-16 overall) saw Eastern piece together seven runs in the fifth inning.

“Stuff like that is going to happen,” NIU starting pitcher Nathan Stillwell said. “It’s frustrating, but you can’t let stuff like that get to you. It was just a rough inning.”

Stillwell gave up eight runs in 4 1/3 innings, but only four of those runs were earned.

“This is a crazy game,” EIU coach Jim Schmitz said. “You hit, hit, hit, and sometimes you bunt, and you get all the runs in.”

NIU scored two runs in the seventh to narrow the margin to 9-6, but EIU (10-20) added another run in the eighth.

The Huskies also had another chance to come back the eighth when Greg Larsen led off with a triple to right-center field.

The next two batters hit shallow fly-ball outs. Eric Sansouci beat out an infield single by sliding headfirst in the next at-bat but had to be taken out of the game because of an injury from the slide.

Larsen scored on Sansouci’s single, but the inning ended when Jeff Dunaway was thrown out when trying to take two bases on a passed ball.

“For the whole game, we felt like we were right in it,” Stillwell said.

Sansouci led the Huskies in offense, going 3 for 5 with two RBIs and two runs scored. Larsen added a pair of hits, going 2 for 4 with a triple and a run scored, while Rob Marconi drove in two RBIs for NIU.

In front of a season-high crowd of 257, the Huskies used eight pitchers – seven in the final 4 2/3 innings.

“We go into it with a plan to use some of these guys,” NIU coach Ed Mathey said. “We want to beat these teams, but our main focus is to keep guys rested for the MAC games.”