The Binghamton baseball team continued to struggle this past weekend. The Bearcats (3-9) traveled to VCU and after losing two close games, 3-1 and 2-1, they were blown out in the third game, 18-3.
“Truth be told, we just have to play better,” said BU head coach Tim Sinicki. “We didn’t play as well as we are capable of this past weekend. We were down a couple starters who were out with injury but that’s no excuse.”
BU had trouble finding a timely hit in the first game of Saturday’s doubleheader. Binghamton outhit VCU (8-8) eight to seven, but also left eight men on base.
The Bearcats had the opposite problem in the second game of the weekend series. VCU took a no-hitter into the eighth inning against BU. After over seven hitless innings, redshirt sophomore infielder Alex Baratta gave Binghamton its first hit with a one-out single to left field.
“I thought we pitched pretty well this weekend up until yesterday’s ballgame,” Sinicki said. “We have not done a great job getting guys in from third base with less than two outs — we have to do a better job there.”
The rest of the Bearcats did not have as much luck, as they were struck out 11 times in the second game of the series. Baratta’s hit ended up being Binghamton’s only hit of the game.
“Defensively we’ve been okay, but we have to clean some things up,” Sinicki said. “There’s no one area that is really outperforming another, so we have to get better in all different areas of the game. Our base running has been erratic as well.”
As one of Binghamton’s lone bright spots of the weekend, sophomore relief pitcher Ben Anderson came in and got the job done for BU on Friday. The 6-foot-3-inch right-hander threw three innings of no-hit baseball to keep Binghamton in the first game; unfortunately, the offense couldn’t hold up its end of the bargain and the team dropped the opener 3-1.
“When you pitch and the offense isn’t scoring a lot of runs, you feel like you have to go out there and be perfect,” Sinicki said. “Every run that you give up makes a comeback that much more difficult, so we have to be better than that, we have to be able to put that aside.”
Pitching does not appear to be the central problem for BU. Senior Nick Wegmann recorded a quality outing, allowing just one earned run off six hits in 6.0 innings of work to kick off the doubleheader, despite the 2-1 defeat.
“As a pitcher, you can only do the things that you can control, and you can’t control what your offense or defense behind you is doing,” Sinicki said. “All you can do is try to keep their team at bay and it just got away from us a little bit in game three.”
However, the result of the second game in the doubleheader displayed the immense fatigue that this pitching staff is under, since allowing only five runs over two games is strenuous. The offensive struggles have begun to negatively affect the pitching staff.
After dropping the first two games of the series, BU jumped out to an early 2-1 lead in the top half of the fourth. The fourth inning was also a rallying cry for the Rams, who scored seven runs to open up an 8-2 lead early on.
Binghamton’s overall fatigue was also made apparent in the field. The Bearcats committed four errors in the third game while VCU was credited with 21 hits, six of which came off of junior starting pitcher Nick Gallagher in three innings pitched. The Rams ultimately swept BU in the three-game series with the score of the final game reading 18-3.
Binghamton is set to return to the diamond this weekend. The Bearcats are scheduled to start America East play with a three-game series at Stony Brook. Their first game is scheduled for noon on Saturday from Joe Nathan Field in Stony Brook, New York.