UC Irvine baseball wins series finale against Long Beach State
LONG BEACH – There were many reasons why UC Irvine’s baseball team was expected to be as good in 2022 as they were in 2021.
Last season’s team set a Big West record for most league wins, pushed Stanford to a regional title game, and believed they could spin another season like that with two-thirds of the starting lineup and eight veteran pitchers returning.
They certainly looked that way Sunday, when three pitchers held Long Beach State to four hits in a 2-1 win at Blair Field. They are now 24-17 on the season, have 10 one-run wins, and owns the second-best record in league play with 12 more league plays remaining.
But there are a lot of missing numbers in that breakdown. Like UC Santa Barbara having dominated league play with a 19-2 record, with the next closer team 6 ½ games behind and with the Anteaters losing four of their last five series.
The 2021 team hit .314 and had a team ERA of 3.50. The ’22 team is hitting .260 with a 4.31 ERA.
“It’s hard to put a finger on it,” coach Ben Orloff said Sunday. “You always like having returning players but it’s a new year and things don’t always improve.
“I think we’re playing better, but we haven’t been able to find a way to win. It’s like we’ve been running in the wrong lane and coming out of series disappointed.”
Long Beach State came into the series on a 10-game losing streak in a season with its own digressions. But they hit the ball well in a 6-2 win Friday and then shutout UC Irvine with four hits Saturday.
“It’s the kind of season where you don’t want to look at the standings or what out RPI (Rating Percentage Index) is, Orloff said.”
What the Anteaters have is the time to close and impressively. They host UCSB next weekend looking to slow the Gaucho train and have a rematch with nationally ranked UCLA, whom the Anteaters beat last week.
They’re only a game out of second place in league and have the second-highest national RPI (Ratings Percentage Index) among league teams. They got key two-out RBI singles from Abe Garcia-Pacheco and Taishi Nakawake, a tag-team effort from Cameron Wheeler, Troy Taylor, and Gordon Ingebritson on the mound (one hit after the third), and rightfield Nathan Church threw a man out at the plate.
“The problematic thing is the Big West is now being looked at a one-bid conference (for the postseason). We deserved a bid in 2019 and didn’t get one, and Santa Barbara deserved one last season and didn’t get it.”
Which explains why looking at the league standings is a bad way to start a morning.
Long Beach is 17-25 overall and 7-11 in league play. The Beach has series left with low-hanging UC Riverside and UC Davis, plus Bakersfield and Cal State Fullerton.