Coach John Savage sat quietly at his desk, staring at a folded stat sheet, trying to make sense of what, thus far, has been a troubling season.
His team had yet again lost a game in which they led early ““ this time a 5-3 loss to No. 8 San Diego ““ and the usually upbeat and articulate Savage seemed dejected and at a loss for words.
“It’s hard to put a finger on it,” Savage said when asked why the team has been so erratic this season.
It has been a trying season for the UCLA baseball team (24-21, 7-8 Pac-10), one marked by subpar play and an inability to live up to preseason expectations.
Those expectations were lofty, as evidenced when Baseball America tabbing the Bruins as its No. 1 team. And the ranking seemed to fit, at least at the time. The Bruins finished last season on a torrid run to make it to the NCAA Super Regionals for the first time under Savage’s tenure. The team returned the core of that lineup and starting rotation, and the signs seemed to point to a breakout season for the UCLA baseball program.
Yet, 45 games into the season and with 11 remaining, the Bruins find themselves unranked with a mediocre overall record and stuck in sixth place in the crowded Pac-10 standings just below .500.
So why has the team struggled so mightily this season to maintain some semblance of consistency?
“I’ve been asked that question a lot,” Savage said. “It comes down to us not playing up to our capabilities. We haven’t hit consistently this season. At times, we haven’t had the pitching, or the defense. So it’s a combination of things ““ not just one thing.
“What’s gone on the first 45 games, we haven’t expected, but we feel that there is time to make a case for a (play-off) bid.”
A glaring disparity between this season and last year is the lack of a long winning streak. Last season, the Bruins were able to make a run to a regional berth on the strength of two seven-game winning streaks. This season, the longest winning streak of the season was five games, and it occurred within the Bruins’ first seven games.
“I think that we haven’t played together enough,” first baseman Casey Haerther said. “There have been sparks of playing together throughout the season, but as a whole, we haven’t played together. We have had some opportunities to win games, and we haven’t gotten it done.
“But we have three series left, and I feel that we can make a run into the postseason. That’s all you have to do; get hot going into the playoffs.”
Junior starting pitcher Tim Murphy said he believes that the team may finally be close to replicating the streak the Bruins had last season when they rebounded from a poor start to win 22 of their final 34 games.
“If you look at kind of the tradition that we have had, we’ve always struggled at the beginning of the season and then gelled at the end of the season,” Murphy said. “This season, we got off to a rocky start with injuries, and now we are finally starting to get healthy and come back together.”
An added dimension of the Bruins’ struggles this season has been the paucity of production from junior Cody Decker and sophomore Gabe Cohen. Last season, Decker and Cohen were key components of the Bruins’ offense: Decker batted .307 while hitting a team-leading 14 home runs and 57 RBI and striking out only 46 times; Cohen, the Pac-10 Co-Newcomer of the Year, batted .345 with 10 home runs, 36 RBI and 71 hits.
But this season the production from the two has drastically declined. Decker is batting a team-low .198 while hitting only four home runs, driving in 14 runs and fanning 41 times. Cohen has struggled as well, hitting a subpar .205 while hitting seven home runs in 27 hits.
Despite the immense offensive struggles that the two have encountered this season, Savage believes that both are more than capable of bouncing back in the remainder of the season.
“We believe in both of them,” Savage said. “Both Cody and Gabe can hit the ball and play well, but it hasn’t happened so far this season. But we feel that both can get it turned around in one weekend. We have complete confidence in both of their abilities. There is an opportunity to turn the season around.”
One source of encouragement for the Bruins could be the team that they will face this weekend: Oregon State. The Beavers successfully defended their national title last season after finishing only 10-14 in the Pac-10, sixth in the conference. Yet, spurred by a series win on the road against the Bruins in the last weekend of the regular season, Oregon State made it into the postseason and went on a run to the College World Series. The Beavers won all five of their games in the series on the road to their second consecutive title.
For UCLA, in a similar position to Oregon State’s last season, the road the Beavers took to Omaha gives the Bruins a model to follow.
“Because of the structure of college baseball, it’s all about getting in,” Savage said. “From the West, you are battle-tested, and if you get in the tournament and are in the right frame of mind, you can run the table like Oregon State did. So we certainly look to them as an example of what can happen.”
Behind the actions and the words of the Bruins’ players and coaches seems to be a clear belief that this team has the ability to turn its season around and make a run into the postseason. Working in the Bruins’ favor is the actual structure of college baseball itself, in which a team’s RPI factors heavily in its chances of earning a regional berth. As of Wednesday, the Bruins’ RPI stood at 50. The Pac-10 has seven teams in the top 50.
For Murphy, the remainder of the season will give the Bruins an opportunity to turn their season around and make it one to remember for the success the team achieved, not the expectations they failed to live up to.
“It’s all a matter of getting into the postseason and running with it once you’re in,” Murphy said. “Once you’re in, anything can happen. In the postseason, it doesn’t matter; you could be a No. 4 seed or a No. 1 seed. Everyone is 0-0.”