Oregon head coach George Horton has had a bad stretch of days recently. His baseball team is the loser of six straight games and eight of its last nine. The team was swept by the USC Trojans over the weekend and then lost a slugfest to the Portland Pilots on Tuesday.
On April 9, the same day the Ducks lost on a walk-off home run to the Trojans, Horton found out that a former player of his from Cal State Fullerton, 25-year old John Wilhite, was in the car crash that killed Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart and two other people. Wilhite is still in the ICU, but he’s better, and Horton actually visited him over the weekend and was there when he first opened his eyes.
Just talking to the Duck skipper about the ordeal makes him choke up, and he says that the wreck gave him time to put into perspective why they play this game.
But added to the stress of losing and worrying about a former player is the recent collapse of Oregon’s most reliable commodity: pitching. Horton’s focus lately has been on fixing the offensive struggles the team has been having – so losing four straight games due to shoddy pitching has been even more frustrating.
“I think they’ve started to give in to the fact that they have to do something pretty special in order for us to win,” Horton said after Tuesday’s 12-8 loss to Portland. “And that’s very dangerous. The one thing that was a constant for us was our pitching. But I’m not going to blame the pitchers. They’ve carried us all year long. We just need to get back to focusing.”
Pitching tight, or pitching carefully has been a sentiment that coaches and pitchers have voiced. The Ducks have been frustrated from the plate, scoring infrequently and giving little support to the pitching staff. While the team batting average hovers around a middling .237, Oregon’s ERA is ranked in the top-25 nationally.
However, even the pitchers have lost it to a degree. Before the USC series, Oregon’s ERA was ninth in the nation at 3.53 runs allowed per nine innings. But the Ducks allowed 22 runs in three games to the Trojans, and the Pilots shelled the team for 12 runs on 12 hits, and the ERA has crept up to 4.06 runs per game.
“It was a rough weekend,” pitching coach Andrew Checketts said. “I thought they felt pressure not to give up any runs, and they didn’t take outs when they presented themselves, and pitched tight with runners on and no outs. That led to some crooked numbers.”
“We’ve stopped pitching one pitch at a time,” sophomore pitcher Drew Gagnier said. “We just need to get back to the basics. Earlier in the year we were dialed in and could throw whatever we wanted to, wherever we wanted to. Now we’ve hit a little bit of a speed bump.”
But the main opinion of both Horton and Checketts is that the pitchers are not being aggressive early in the count, and that’s forcing them to pitch from behind in the count.
“When you have 15 guys down there it’s hard to say what one exact thing,” Checketts said. “But I thought we weren’t aggressive early in the count, and that rolled us into some offensive counts. We couldn’t throw our off-speed pitches for strikes, so guys were sitting fastball.”
That’s just backwards, says Horton.
“The fact that we’re losing, and the fact that we’ve been struggling to score runs has made them try to hard and pitch more careful,” he said. “Now they’re nibbling at the corners of the plate instead of being aggressive like they used to. That’s making them fall behind in the count, and then they have to throw one over the middle of the plate.”
Even Oregon’s dominant closer, Gagnier, has felt the heat lately. On Saturday he gave up three runs in one inning of work, and walked one batter. He wasn’t hitting his spots, and because of it he fell behind to batters and couldn’t throw some of his more effective off-speed pitches.
“I thought about it a little bit, and I can’t really put a finger on it,” he said. “They got a couple hits the last few outings, and that’s something I haven’t been used to: runners on base. But I’ve been working more from the stretch, and it’s paying off. ”
The improvement was seen in Gagnier’s last outing against Portland on Tuesday. He pitched a perfect ninth inning with two strikeouts.
But one pitcher in particular will need more than just one good outing to get back on track. Junior Bennett Whitmore, who started this spring as a leading candidate for the starting role on Fridays, has fallen off the horse to some extent. He’s gone 1-5 so far this season with a 5.80 ERA, and he gave up three runs on three hits in his two innings of work on Tuesday.
“We talk all the time,” Checketts said. “I’m just trying to find the right thing to talk about. I thought Bennett came out with a better mentality (against Portland). He’s trying to get himself to relax a little bit, and enjoy the game more. He hasn’t felt like he’s been enjoying the game, instead he’s been working the game and that’s created some tension.”
The coaches are hoping they’ll get through this. But Horton’s positivity is waning because of the struggles, and he knows his team can no longer rely on the “being young” excuse.
“Every guy we run out there has good stuff and can throw strikes,” he said. “I’m probably not real positive, but I’m trying to be. I certainly don’t want to clamp down any tighter … but I think I have a team that needs fixing in some way. We’re not young anymore. We’ve played 33 games. They know what they have to do.”
Gagnier remains upbeat, seeing better skies on the horizon.
“That’s the great thing about baseball,” he said. “We’ve lost six in a row, but we have five games in five days coming up and it’s a great opportunity for us to prove ourselves as a pitching staff and as a team.”
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