May is the last full month of regular season baseball at the collegiate level. For most teams, that means 15 to 20 games (Oregon plays 18), and in that time a team can either make or break its bid for a playoff spot in the NCAA tournament.
So far, Oregon’s May hasn’t gone according to plan. The No. 22 Ducks (31-18) are 3-4 after two weeks in the month, well off the pace that they had originally set for themselves.
“Our mission was to win all of them in May, but obviously we can’t do that now,” sophomore shortstop Danny Pulfer said.
Head coach George Horton had mentioned this goal back after Oregon lost 3-1 to Portland on May 4, saying that it was the month where runs were started by good teams.
But unfortunately for Oregon, the Ducks can’t even go 17-1 this month. A weekend sweep at the hands of the Oregon State Beavers further spiraled the team toward a dismal ending, and now the Ducks are on a razor’s edge. They blew out No. 19 San Diego 13-4 on Tuesday, exploding for 13 hits, and now the Ducks have 11 games left to make a case why a team that went 14-42 last year should get into the postseason. They start this weekend with East Tennessee State at home for a three-game series.
“We’re going to try and win every game like our life is on the line,” Horton said. “We don’t know a lot about East Tennessee State; we do know they aren’t the who’s who of college baseball, but we need to take care of ourselves and this weekend.”
It’s an interesting position the Ducks are in right now. Their next five games are out of conference, and the team is coming into this weekend with almost no idea of what kind of team the Buccaneers (29-21) are.
“We don’t have any information on these guys,” Pulfer admitted. “We’re going to have to take it pitch by pitch and see what these guys have. It’s big because it could give us that run to go into the playoffs and stay hot and keep things going. That’s what the good teams do.”
Pulfer said a team from out of conference will actually be a welcome relief for the guys who are in semi-slumps.
“It’s different. I think it’s nice because you don’t have to worry about scouting reports against us,” he said.
At the same time, Pulfer explained the difficulty of feeling out a new opponent.
“Scouting reports get passed out,” Pulfer said. “We know how to play guys. Certain ground balls are outs versus hits when we play Pac-10 teams. We may have to get dinged up a little bit, take some punches before we figure these guys out, how to play them … It will be different because we don’t have any information, but it’s still baseball.”
There is hope that the Ducks have turned the corner. Tuesday’s game helped renew the confidence a bit in the hitting, which had slumped during the four-game losing streak the team had endured.
“We needed to re-establish our swagger and our confidence,” Horton said. “We didn’t come out of Corvallis thinking we were a crummy baseball team; we just got beat by a better baseball team that particular weekend.”
Horton doesn’t want his team to dwell on the losses, but instead focus on the remaining games. He preached all weekend long about using the games as a turning point.
Sometimes, Pulfer says, the best teams are the ones that respond positively to adversity.
“When you get left on the field three times like we did this weekend, you kind have to say, ‘Wow, we need to figure these things out,’” Pulfer said. “And on Tuesday I think we did. We got back to playing Duck baseball.”
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