By Gio Gaxiola — Reporter
It was not a good weekend for the San Jose State baseball team. The Spartans dropped all three games at home against Loyola-Marymount University.
Here are my takeaways from the weekend series.
A broken record plays the same sad tune
What seems to be a common thread for the Spartans season is the fact they cannot capitalize on the opportunity of having runners on base. There were a handful of times where the team would get bases loaded, in no outs situations. Yet, they would get one or no runs from it. All three games had 10 plus players left on base. For the weekend total, 33 runners were left on base.
“We gotta find a little offense, you can’t win ball games if you can’t score runs,” head coach Brad Sanfilippo. “It’s a long season, a weekend series does not define us. The goal is to play better baseball by the time conference play hits.”
The team is going to need to find a way to score runs if it wants to win more games. The team currently sits at a 5-11 record..
Rain, rain go away
On Saturday, the game had an hour long rain delay. However, that didn’t stop senior infielder Troy Viola from going yard. He took a ball over the left field fence in the first inning.
“I saw my pitch and turned on one. I’ll be honest, the rain had blocked my vision of the ball a little, but once I saw the left fielder stop running, I knew I got all of it,” Viola said. Although the Spartans did lose that game, starting pitcher Kevin Kyle had a solid outing. He even came back to pitch after the rain delay.
“I was fine to go, our trainer took care of me during the break. So I was good to go after the break,” Kyle said. He did get roughed up in the third inning, but he was able to come back and put up a zero in the next inning.
Losing streaks hurt
With getting swept this weekend against LMU, the Spartans are now in the midst of a five game losing streak.
“We have to show up and compete. If we work our tails off, hopefully we can go on a five game winning streak, ” said junior shortstop Ruben Mercardo. Losing streaks can hurt a team’s morale. “We have proven we can play with quality people, but we just gotta figure out how to beat quality people,” Sanfilippo said.
It is a long season. With a quarter of it almost done, the Spartans are gonna need to turn it around.The Spartans have a chance to redeem themselves this upcoming week against the University Of California on Tuesday in Berkley.
Follow Gio on Twitter @GaxiolaGio