By Dylan Hernandez
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
The college baseball season is more than half completed, but
Gary Adams still can’t explain why his team isn’t
winning.
Adams sighs, wrinkles his forehead and shrugs his shoulders
after each of his team’s losses. He stands with his hands on
his hips, scanning the outfield in search of an answer among the
blades of grass.
But he can’t find one.
After another shrug, all he can offer is, “I don’t
know. Sometimes they just want it too badly.”
Or: “I know that they wanted it. It’s not because of
a lack of desire.”
No team as good as his, Adams thinks, is 15-22.
No team as good as his, he thinks, should have lost two of three
home games against Arizona State, as the Bruins did this past
weekend.
Arizona State (24-13) is a quality team, good enough to be
ranked 23rd nationally, but Adams can’t help being
disappointed.
The Bruins played hard. They fielded well. And, by large, they
pitched and hit well.
Doing so earned UCLA, ranked 125th in the latest RPI rankings, a
10-2 win over ASU on Saturday in the second game of the series.
The Bruins, however, lost 4-3 in 11 innings on Friday night and
15-2 on Sunday afternoon.
The pair of defeats dropped UCLA’s conference record to
2-4, while ASU’s improved to 8-4.
“We’re extremely disappointed,” Bruin hitting
coach Vince Beringhele said. “It was our first home Pac-10
series and we wanted to hold court. We prepared really well and had
good scouting report.”
Beringhele and the Bruins almost got their way on Friday night.
Carried by freshman starting pitcher Chris Cordeiro, UCLA led 3-1
through six innings. The Sun Devils leveled the score in the top of
the seventh and extended the game into extra innings, where they
scored the winning run.
In the eighth, ninth and 10th innings, the Bruins had runners in
scoring position, but couldn’t drive them home.
“Clutch hitting to me is no more than having confidence in
tight situation and sticking with what you’ve been
doing,” Adams said. “Sometimes, our guys want it so
badly that they get away from what got them there.”
The loss left Adams and Beringhele as perplexed as ever.
So on Saturday, not knowing what else to do, Beringhele
suggested that the team wear new gear. The Bruins came out with
white caps instead of their customary blue ones. In place of their
solid-blue socks were ones with yellow stripes.
The change in attire inspired a change in fortune. Freshman Wes
Whisler threw 7.1 innings of two-run ball and catcher Josh Arhart
went three for four with a home run in UCLA’s 10-2 win.
The uniform change probably had as much to do with the win as
the astrology report in the local paper, but Adams took it.
Whatever works, fine, he figured.
“New day, new look, new season,” Adams said.
“If we keep winning, we’ll keep wearing the new
uniforms.”
Anyway, Adams noted, the uniforms looked good.
But by the end of Sunday’s series finale, a game which
UCLA was never in, Beringhele was saying, “(They didn’t
look) good enough to get it done today.”
“(Saturday) reassured us of how well we can play,”
Bruin second baseman Ryan Rasmussen said. “We just
can’t put it together consistently.
“We’re kind of in a rut. Our record isn’t
indicative of what kind of club we are.”