Stuff that happened….Reggie Bussey upsets Rutgers third baseman Pablo Santos as he arrives with his second inning triple. (Press Pros Feature Photos)
In a game that clearly characterized their season, overall, the Buckeyes played their way out of a chance to take a series from Rutgers, losing 13-5.
Columbus, OH – If the business about the truth setting you free has any merit at all, perhaps the way the Ohio State Buckeyes lost Sunday’s series finale to Rutgers will do them mammoth good in the future.
The Buckeyes parlayed 6 walks, 2 hit batsmen, and 6 errors into a 13-5 loss to Rutgers to deny themselves a highly winnable series, let alone their 12th win of the season and their 4 conference win. When you’re 11-30 every ray of sunlight is magnified, and Sunday magnified what’s characterized this baseball team through its first 41 games.
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After scoring 2 runs in the bottom of the first, starter Gavin Kuzniewski quickly surrendered that lead in the top of the second; and after the Buckeyes came back to retake the lead with 2 in the bottom of the second Kuzniewski again could not come up with a shut down inning.
And part of the issue was simply the fact of the Buckeyes being atrocious with their infield defense, repeatedly giving Rutgers opportunities for extra base runners and extra at bats. That proved to be too much for even a veteran baseball team.
Rutgers would end up scoring 2 in the second, 1 in the third, 1 in the fourth off of Kuzniewski…then turned on reliever Zak Sigman to score 2 in the fifth, 2 in the sixth, 2 in the eighth, and 3 in the ninth off Luke Carrell and Tanis Lange.
The Buckeyes managed to score those 2 in the first, 2 more in the second, and then the bats went silent in the third through the seventh before scoring an irrelevant run in the bottom of the eighth on an RBI single by Matt Graveline, one of the few Buckeye hitters to show up when the time for showing up was nigh. Graveline would go 3 for 5 for the game and drive in 3…while teammate Tyler Pettorini went 1 for 5 and drove in the other two runs.
But the walks, the defense, and the fact of ten Buckeyes runners left on base clearly frustrated Justin Haire in his post-game comments.
Defensive gem…Matt Graveline’s leaping catch of a line drive in the fifth inning.
“Yeah, it’s frustrating,” said Haire, staring blankly at the post-game box score. “We actually had more errors than showed on the box score and we’ll get that fixed [in the records]. We played atrocious defense in the infield, and those five errors don’t include all the other miscues that don’t get scooped up in the fielding percentage.
“Our pitchers are giving us everything they have and we can’t pay catch, we left ten men on, and…yeah, man. Just a really disappointing day.”
And particularly disappointing when you factor that it’s Rutgers, another team under .500, and after Saturday’s 16-8 shellacking of the Knights’ pitching staff…the six walks, the hit batsmen, and the six errors just didn’t get it done. Of the six walks, the six errors, and a hit batsman in the ninth, six of them scored…and the final deficit was 8!
“I felt like it was an opportunity to win a series at home,” Haire added. “1,300 people here, beautiful Sunday, and we just didn’t show up.”
The sheer numbers are negative enough. This was a team that no one believed would be 11-30 at the two-thirds point of the season. And clearly, those who profess to know Big Ten baseball believed it good enough to compete for one of the twelve tournament seeds. But it’s not negative when the facts – the numbers – validate. Like we’ve written before, it’s the baseball version of Groundhog Day.
“Yeah,” Haire agreed. “It’s just so frustrating because we had their starter on the ropes with first and second and nobody out in the third…and go strikeout, groundout, strikeout…and then disappear there in the middle innings.”
In fact, they reprised the third in the sixth and eighth innings when both times they had two on with less than two out and failed to take advantage…in total, six of the ten men left on base.
“It’s my fault because we clearly don’t have these guys as prepared as we thought that we did. We’ll continue to work on that over these last three-plus weeks…and do the absolute best we can down the stretch.”
Game Notes…..
Reliever Zak Sigman was forced to leave the game in the top of the eighth when he turned an ankle while covering first base. There were no reports on the injury, but he was with the club in the dugout and on crutches at game’s end.
Tough as the game was, the Buckeyes hung around afterwards to play meet and greet with a hundred youth baseball players, running the bases with them and signing autographs…and did it while the Rutgers players sat in the stands and watched, eating their post-game meal before going to the airport.
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