The home run has been Iowa State’s Achilles’ heel all season long.

Iowa State is last in the Big 12, giving up 51 home runs this season. The 11th place team, Missouri, has given up 34 homers this year.

The Cyclones have also had trouble matching those home runs with homers of their own, hitting only 19 this season, at least six behind all other Big 12 teams.

“We don’t hit them, and we have been giving them up,” said coach Stacy Gemeinhardt-Cesler. “If you start worrying about hitting home runs, you are not going to hit any home runs. If you worry about giving up home runs, you are going to give up home runs.”

Those troubles reared their ugly head again against Texas A&M at the Southwest Athletics Complex in Ames as the Cyclones were swept by the Aggies.

Texas A&M hit four home runs in the two-game series, accounting for seven of the team’s 13 runs on the weekend. All of those home runs came against the Cyclones’ ace, junior Rachel Zabriskie.

“It’s easy to point that out because it seems like that was the main thing that happened,” Gemeinhardt-Cesler said.

“But you have to remember that there are a lot of other pitches and opportunities that are thrown throughout the entire game and it’s what you do with those other pitches as well.”

Zabriskie has been the Cyclones’ workhorse this season, pitching more than 67 percent of the innings this season. She is the all-time strikeout leader for the Cyclones, she leads the team with a 2.31 ERA and opponents are batting just .217 against her this year. But Iowa State’s ace pitcher has struggled giving up the home run all season long.

“I tend to throw higher,” Zabriskie said. “I throw rise balls and a lot of my throws just tend to go up because of the spin I throw it with. When you pitch high in the Big 12 or anywhere, balls are going to go out.”

Therefore, with Zabriskie’s motion naturally bringing the ball higher in the strike zone, when she makes a mistake the ball usually doesn’t land within 200 feet of home plate.

“When I make mistakes, I make threefold mistakes — I lose speed, it gets high and it loses movement,” Zabriskie said. “When you put all three of those things together, they are going to get hit for home runs and not just hits.”

The opposing team’s familiarity with Zabriskie can also cause problems for the ace pitcher. This weekend, she started both games, so by Sunday the hitters had all faced her four or five times within a 24-hour time period. That familiarity helped Aggie freshman Sydney Shannon with her home run Sunday that put Texas A&M up 2-0.

“I assumed that she was going to come inside, about mid-thigh, because that is what she has been doing to me,” Shannon said.

As the innings and the home runs pile up, Zabriskie is finding it harder and harder to move past giving up the long ball.

“The main thing is to try not to think about the home run,” Zabriskie said.

“You can’t take it back. So getting two home runs in an inning is not what I am supposed to do. Earlier I didn’t do that, but lately I’ve been thinking about it and that’s just not what I’m supposed to do. Pitchers should always be dumb.”