Have you ever seen the television show “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”?
If you have, I salute you.
If not, I highly recommend it.
My favorite character in the show is Charlie. Eccentric and a little too quick to make decisions, Charlie provides the show with a lot of its humor with his wacky and scatterbrained ideas, leaving the audience wondering what asinine thing he will do next.
There was that time when he wanted to be an undercover cop and proceeded to dress up like Al Pacino’s character in “Serpico” to uncover a conspiracy about “dirty cops” in Philadelphia.
There was that other time when he wanted to host a dance-off, yet failed to realize that by doing so he was putting his bar up as the prize.
Or that other time when he cut the brakes of a van he was riding in simply because he was “the wild card.”
Long story short, Charlie is consistently inconsistent: You never know exactly what he is going to do, but you can be certain of the general idea.
The UCLA baseball team is the exact same: consistently inconsistent.
And it’s not just this season. If you look back at the years since John Savage took over in 2005, the Bruins have been marked by inconsistency.
Savage’s first season the Bruins won just 15 games, at one point enduring a 19-game losing streak.
In his second season, the Bruins’ longest winning streak was five games; their longest losing streak was three games. The Bruins were unable to get into any sort of rhythm, with wins and losses seesawing back and forth.
Perhaps the best example is the 2007 season. At one point early in the season the Bruins lost 10 of 12 games. This was followed by a stretch in which they won 19 of 24 games, only to be directly followed by a stretch in which they lost seven of 10 to end the season. Consistently inconsistent. Periods of losses followed by periods of wins.
Last year the team’s longest winning streak was five games, yet it was another year filled without a real quality win-streak.
This season the team opened up with a 10-game losing streak and the longest winning streak it has had this season is three.
What makes the past two seasons all the more frustrating is the expectations placed upon the team, and the subsequent failure by the Bruins to live up to them.
In 2008 the Bruins were tabbed by Baseball America as the preseason No. 1 team in the nation. They ended the regular season with a 31-25 record, out of the top 25, and were unsure if they would receive an NCAA Regional bid.
This season, the Bruins opened the season as the No. 9 team in the nation according to Baseball America.
I said that this team was better than last year’s.
But yet again, the Bruins have proved undeserving of the ranking, dropping out of the Top 25 after just two weeks.
With 23 games left in the regular season, the Bruins sit at 14-19 overall, good enough for sixth in the Pac-10 with a record of 6-6. To say that the Bruins will make it to the NCAA Regionals for the fourth consecutive year, with a schedule which includes road games at top-ranked Arizona State, UC Irvine and Cal State Fullerton, is not only a stretch but downright fanciful.
In order to get to 31 wins, the number of wins the Bruins had at the end of the regular season last year, they would need to win 17 of their next 23 games. Players believe that they have finally turned a corner and are ready for the stretch run.
But what makes you think they can put together a stretch of wins like that? This season, they have not shown the ability to win with the regularity needed to warrant an NCAA bid. One minute they get crushed at home by UC Riverside, then they turn around and beat nationally ranked UC Irvine and San Diego State.
This team has the ability to win, just not the ability to do it with any semblance of consistency. That is why this team won’t make the NCAA Regionals, thus making my claim that it is better than last year’s team totally moot.
But I still hold that the talent of this team is better; they simply can’t figure out a way to string together wins at the right moment.
So us Bruin fans are left with Charlie, someone you can rely on to continually confuse you.
Email Howard at ahoward@media.ucla.edu if you own a Green Man suit he can have.