Getting ready to take our team picture and have our last practice of the season today. Tomorrow’s a travel day as we head to Tacoma to take on PLU to conclude our season.
To say we’ve hit a bit of a rough patch during the last few weeks would be an understatement. Losing streaks happen, surely, but they’re never fun to go through. Heading into the last series of the year, it’s hard not to look back and wonder about what-ifs and should-haves. As previously mentioned on the blog, there were several series in which we felt like we should have walked away with more W’s. There were also weekends where we didn’t play up to our ability, or flatly didn’t play good baseball.
Our last two non- conference games we winnable but we came up short because we gave up too many runs. Every midweek game this year we have thrown several pitchers for just an inning or two apiece. It would be great to have a fourth starter, a guy who was itching to get in the games during the weekend but was held back because we had enough pitching to win the series. Then we c0uld throw him on a Tuesday and allow the guy to go 5 or 6 innings and allow our pitching staff to develop. But that just wasn’t the situation this year.
Pitching has been our major weakness all year. There’s no beating around the bush there. On Saturday some of our more reliable guys struggled on the bump, but Sunday was exciting because of the way our guys stepped up and shut down a pretty good offensive team. If we play that kind of baseball this weekend, and every weekend, then we will compete with any team in our conference.
There’s plenty of time for summing up our accomplishments after the season is over, though. Right now we have to focus on playing our best baseball at the end of the season. So today’s practice will be all about focusing on what we need to do to be successful. One main focus will be successfully executing situational hitting. We’ve put up good numbers all year, but timely hitting on a consistent basis has not been a strong point. If we continue to pepper the ball around the yard, and then follow with hits in run-scoring situations, we will be competitive.
