Baseball faces UCSB, hoping to continue weekend’s win streak
Freshman outfielder Cody Keefer hit a walk-off home run Sunday, leading the Bruins to a sweep of the Trojans. UCLA will face UC Santa Barbara tonight at Jackie Robinson Stadium, in the Bruins’ next-to-last midweek game of the season.
By Ryan Eshoff
May 17, 2010 9:43 p.m.
There are weekends, and then there are weekends.
In college baseball, where 75 percent of games are played from Friday to Sunday, a team’s state of mind can swing significantly based on what happened over that stretch.
For No. 10 UCLA (37-11), it would be difficult to draw up a better script than what unfolded this most recent weekend at Jackie Robinson Stadium. Not only did the Bruins score 30 total runs and get a walk-off homer on Sunday en route to a sweep, they did it all against their arch-rival USC.
“If you get a sweep on anybody, your confidence is going to go up,” said freshman outfielder Cody Keefer, who hit the winning blast in Sunday’s final at-bat. “It’s good to get our confidence back up.”
That confidence could come in handy as UCLA begins its stretch run tonight against UC Santa Barbara. The Gauchos (21-25) are coming off a weekend in which they lost two out of three against UC Irvine, a team that beat UCLA last week.
The matchup could serve as a precursor to a weekend with potentially huge conference-standings implications, with UCLA travelling to face California. For now, though, it is all about carrying over the form that they displayed in taking three straight from the Trojans into today’s game.
“Whenever you win a series in the Pac-10 and you finish a weekend like (that), you can build off it,” UCLA coach John Savage said. “We have tremendous challenges ahead of us, we have Santa Barbara, then we go to Cal who’s playing really good. We can build off this but we have a long way to go.”
Tonight will mark the final regular-season start at home for right-hander Garett Claypool. The senior is 7-2 with a 2.11 ERA, and one of those wins came against the Gauchos back on March 23 in one of Claypool’s best performances of the year. Claypool went seven innings, giving up just one unearned run on three hits and one walk, while striking out 10 in the 7-1 UCLA victory.
He will be backed by an offense that exploded at times against the USC pitching staff. The Bruins scored 13 runs on Friday and another 15 on Saturday, the latter output highlighted by home runs from junior outfielder Brett Krill and freshman third baseman Cody Regis. But one of the biggest stories of the season has been UCLA’s consistency ““ or lack thereof ““ on offense, and that trend reared its head once more on Sunday as the Bruins managed just four hits and were shut out before the ninth-inning rally.
Tonight marks UCLA’s penultimate midweek game, and the regular season will conclude entirely in fewer than two weeks. With the postseason looming, the Bruins are emphasizing a steady approach that should eliminate fluctuations in emotion ““ even against USC.
“If you’re going to be good, you’ve got to be relaxed in baseball,” Keefer said. “It’s different than football or any other sport. In baseball, you’ve just got to be relaxed and confident.”
After this last weekend, nailing that second one shouldn’t be much of a problem.
