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BG pitchers gave up way too many free passes this week. The walks, hit batsmen and wild pitches were way too abundant this week. In our last four games (Notre Dame & Miami series), BG walked 23 batters and hit six batters to go along with five wild pitches. In our series against Miami, where we lost two games by one run, we walked nearly twice as many batters as Miami did (14 compared to 8 ), we hit five times as many batters as Miami did (5 compared to 1), and we had three wild pitches compared to none by Miami. A big part of baseball is capitalizing on your opponents mistakes. As a pitcher, you’ve got eight other guys out there on the field to help you get an out. Our opponents are only batting .283 against us, so we’ve got to stop giving up the free passes if we want to get this thing turned around and starting winning again.

Obviously, our pitching wasn’t our only shortcoming this weekend and I don’t want to sound like I am blaming the staff or singling them out for the losses. We also had some costly errors (Miami won game one on an unearned run) and we didn’t exactly light it up offensively either (while Miami’s pitching staff probably had its best outing as a unit in a long time this weekend). But between following the games on GameTracker and then seeing today’s game in person (six walks, three wild pitches and two hit batsmen), Miami was getting on base a lot without actually hitting the ball. And if we don’t get better pitching next weekend, we’re going to get swept again because Kent State is too good to just put runners on base without making them get hits.

you failed to mention the called third strikes with runners in scoring position!!

Might want to keep in mind we are a very young team. When was the last time BG had so many starting / contributing Freshman? Position players & ptichers. Injury bug seems to be hurting us a bit too.

FalconFamily wrote:Might want to keep in mind we are a very young team. When was the last time BG had so many starting / contributing Freshman? Position players & ptichers. Injury bug seems to be hurting us a bit too.

Good points, and I’m not discarding that. In fact, one quick glance at the BG roster shows we are loaded with young talent across the board. Hopefully with all these guys getting experience now it will not only help us out this season, say the MAC Tournament, but it could also play into our hands in the next couple years.

But the last couple weeks have been hard on us in the win/loss column. We let two games get away from us at Akron and we hurt ourselves in a couple losses against Miami. The end result was a 1-5 record during that stretch of games and we're in a real fight right now to make the MAC Tournament.

The other thing to remember, is that we have basically been going all year, without, what would be our #1 and #3 starter in Tyler Saneholtz and Tyler Johnson, who are both coming off surgery, and really haven't been able to pitch up to expectations, or at least anywhere near the # of innings expected at the beginning of the year.