April 10, 2008

Things have turned around a bit as we have won two out of our last four games. We beat Santa Barbara on Saturday night and Nevada on Tuesday night. Overall we have been playing much better baseball. On Friday night we played well and Waldron gave us another strong outing going 7 innings, however the Gauchos put up two runs in the top of the ninth to take the lead and we couldn't answer in the bottom half to suffer the loss. We worked too hard to give up our lead like that in the ninth so it was a really frustrating loss. We have to keep our focus all nine innings if we want to be successful. Saturday night, McCain gave us seven strong innings as well and this time it was our turn to put up two runs in the bottom of the ninth that was capped off with a Joe Olivera walk-off double to plate JB Brown for the winning run. It felt good for us to put a rally together to make a come from behind win and to be able to celebrate it on our home turf. Sunday was a rough one for us as we failed to keep the momentum from Saturday's game going. It was frustrating because typically in college baseball you will get a carry over effect into the next game after a big win like our win the night before, but that failed to happen.

After a day off on Monday that involved a good wiffle ball game with a bunch of the guys, we had a great game Tuesday night against Nevada. It was great to finally be on the other end of a high scoring game. We executed well offensively throughout the whole game rather than just a couple of innings and we played pretty good defense. We staffed the game on the mound with just about every pitcher going one inning each. This seemed to help our pitchers' mindsets knowing that it was their three outs and they needed to bear down and get the job done. Andrew Mintun was pretty excited to get his first start of his career on the hill as a Tiger and Longmire had a great game getting four hits and five RBI's.

Today at noon a group of us players will be attending the Scholar-Athlete Luncheon to be recognized for our hard work in the classroom and then this afternoon we will head off to San Louis Obispo to take on Cal Poly this weekend. We look to keep executing offensively and to get good starting pitching again to keep things rolling for us. Next week we will host Cal on Tuesday night at 6 PM at Klein. Have a great weekend and we hope to see you out there Tuesday night.