After a few scuffles early in the conference portion of the season, Oregon’s club baseball team has turned it around and now hopes to carry that success into regionals, which begin Friday at 3:00 p.m. for Oregon at Optimist Field in LaGrande, Ore.
One noticeable change the Ducks will be sporting once they take the field against first-round opponent Weber State will be the shuffling of the starting rotation. Bryan Hansen will move out of the number two slot, where he was all season, and move up to the top spot, displacing senior Jay Tlougan.
“Bryan Hansen is an All-American-caliber pitcher, and he has continuously gone out and he can be dominant. And so we need to be dominant. That is not to say that we can’t go out there and be dominant with Jay Tlougan, but we have to put the guy out there that has the most innings pitched, the most strikeouts and the lowest ERA,” club coordinator Jonathan Jwayad said.
On the season, Hansen has allowed just four earned runs in 19 conference innings pitched, which works out to an ERA of .44. Tlougan, by contrast, has allowed eight earned runs in his nine conference frames, good for a .88 mark.
To build a stronger sense of team unity, and to lighten the collective mood before the tournament, the Ducks have done a few things together.
First, before the series two weeks ago against Western Washington, the entire team attended the Seattle Mariners game against the Kansas City Royals at Safeco Field. Then, last Saturday the team participated in Green on White scrimmage on the varsity field at Hamlin Middle School.
“It gives us a chance to play serious baseball against each other and it gives us a chance to see what we can do and what we don’t do well so we can give positive input back to our own teammates,” Jwayad said.
Besides the learning aspect, Jwayad noted that the scrimmage also afforded Oregon another chance to relax before what is sure to be a weekend of pressure-filled baseball at the double-elimination tournament.
“It gives us a chance not only to help each other, but to be jovial and relax and understand that when we gel as a team, we play well together,” he said.
Regionals marks the second time this season that Weber State and Oregon matched up against one another. Oregon took two out of three games from the Wildcats in the middle of March, winning the first game of the set 4-0 behind a complete game effort from Hansen. The Ducks also took the second game of the set, 9-6 powered by 3 runs knocked in by freshman outfielder Corey Johnson.
[email protected]