UCLA baseball aims for strong close to disappointing 2016 season

Almost all of the remaining holdovers from UCLA baseball’s lone national championship team will play their final home games this weekend.

It’s a group of four position players: two redshirt senior outfielders, Christoph Bono and Eric Filia, and two senior middle infielders, Trent Chatterton and Brett Urabe.

The other four holdovers from that national title are redshirt juniors who have never before played in the College World Series in Omaha.

They will likely return next year as the very last remnants of the national-title squad, but none of them have started as many games as this year’s four seniors.

The quartet of Bono, Filia, Chatterton and Urabe didn’t plan for this to be their final home series. The original goal of the Bruins’ season was to host an NCAA regional at home – just like they did last year.

At the start of the season, that objective appeared reasonable. UCLA was ranked as high as No. 10 in the country, well in range for a top-16 hosting spot at the NCAA regional.

A lot has changed since the start of the season, however.

The Bruins (24-26, 11-13 Pac-12) have gone from being projected as the No. 2 team in the Pac-12 in February to being the second-to-last team in the conference standings now. The seniors have struggled to live up to expectations, batting a collective .240.

Filia has been a bright spot, batting .317 with a team-high .437 on-base percentage, but both Bono and Chatterton are batting below .200. Urabe has a .265 batting average, but has been caught stealing eight out of 14 times. As a whole, UCLA’s slugging percentage ranks No. 275 out of 295 Division I teams.

“It’s obviously been pretty rough. We’re not used to this,” said coach John Savage, whose team has reached the NCAA Tournament in eight of the past 10 years. “Very disappointing to be in the position that we’re in.”

UCLA has lost four of its last five heading into a three-game set with Arizona State (31-17, 13-11) this weekend. The recent woes have put the seniors in a position where they need to win each of their last six games just to continue their college careers.

“(It’s) all hands on deck,” Urabe said. “It’s gotta be playoff mentality for the rest of the way. … Gotta win every game.”

That was the mentality UCLA had last weekend as well, Urabe said, but it wasn’t enough. The Bruins lost two of three games at home to the USC Trojans in a pivotal series. By the time the three-game set was over, UCLA’s RPI dropped from an already-low 75 to a far worse 89.

UCLA tried to revive its spirits on Tuesday against UC Santa Barbara, but came up one run short.

After that game, Savage didn’t completely dismiss his team’s chances of making the postseason, but he was already looking ahead to next year.

“We’ve got a big recruiting class coming in, which is good, impact guys, so I’m really looking forward to having that class come in,” the UCLA coach said.

As for this weekend, Savage said, “It’s critical that we play well (against Arizona State), or else our season will be over.”