Bronco baseball heads South for spring break

By Scott Sierzenga
Western Herald

After a rough start against Oral Roberts, the Broncos are gearing up to take on Kentucky this weekend with back-to-back doubleheaders on the road.

Nine games in 10 days says it’s that time of year again, the annual baseball spring road trip.
Western Michigan University’s baseball team (0-3) will take a trip down south to Lexington, Ky. in hopes of sweating off some of the rust of playing indoors for four months. That rust showed in their first two games of this past weekend series against Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla.

“We looked like it was our first time outside,” head coach Randy Ford said. “We didn’t play well defensively.”

The Broncos committed seven errors defensively in their first series of the year en route to a winless start of the season. The offense, which was a concern going down to Tulsa stepped up though, scoring 14 runs.

“We did some good things with the bat,” junior captain Chris Lewis said, but added that the Broncos were out hit the first two games.

Ford said he was concerned about their play defensively. However, he believes this trip will be a great chance for a team to improve on defense.

“[By the time] we get back from the spring trip, we’ll be a whole lot better defensively.”

The Brown and Gold lost all three games against Oral Roberts, but showed signs of coming around in its last game. Western took a 4-0 lead through the first three innings. Oral Roberts started its comeback trail in the fourth, scoring a run and adding two more in the seventh. After a walk with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, Oral Roberts’ Seth Furmanek ended the game with a walk-off two-run home run.
Pitching and offense were both strengths for the Broncos in its first series of the season, but so was the play of their four true freshmen: Casey Webber, Casey Hall, Ryan McMillin and Jack Scanlon.

“The freshmen looked really good,” senior captain Brent Gerlach said. “[The freshmen] are going to play an important role, positive role for us.”

Scanlon went 3-for-5 on the weekend with two RBIs, a walk and two stolen bases. Webber remains the only pitcher that has thrown to not give up a run yet, throwing 1.2 scoreless innings of work.

“Pitching was phenomenal,” Gerlach said. “Everyone who stepped on the bump threw well.”

Ford said he noticed the freshmen being a little bit nervous in their first games and was pleased to see players like McMillin settled down with more playing time.

“I don’t want to see [McMillin] struggle but I can only smile because it passes,” Ford said.

The freshmen and pitching will continue to play an important role heading into the upcoming nine games. The Broncos are bringing two additional pitchers, senior Neal Miller and sophomore Eric Heckaman, to try to eat up innings.
Webber and either Heckaman or freshman Troy Forton will start in the fourth and fifth spots, Ford said.
The starting rotation will remain the same for the upcoming week, headed by junior ace Billy Morrison and reigning Mid-American Conference Freshman of the Year, Brain Stroud. Newly appointed starter, junior Derek Mosher, will also play an important role to the rotation.
The competition on this spring trip will be difficult. The Broncos play the 19th ranked team in the country, the University of Kentucky, in a four game series. UK has put up 122 wins over the course of the past three seasons, which is a school record. The Bronco hitters will need to bring their A-game when facing Southeastern Conference First Team pitcher Chris Rusin and the starter of Kentucky’s first game of the season. James Paxin. The left-handed Paxin started 11 games for the Wildcats last season and posted a 4-2 record with an ERA of 2.92.

Following Kentucky will be a game against Moorehead State University, followed by a meeting with the preseason No. 8 University of Louisville Cardinals. The Cardinals are unanimously projected to win the Big East Conference title in 2009. The Broncos will need to be weary of junior third baseman Chris Dominguez, who was named to five All-American teams last season and was the Big East Co-Player of the Year after hitting .365 with a team-leading 21 home runs and 75 RBI. He is also listed as the preseason National Player of the Year by Sporting News.

“I really want to win the games versus Kentucky and Louisville,” Lewis said.

After Louisville, the Broncos will travel to Minnesota to play inside the Metrodome, where the Minnesota Twins play. Western Michigan will face off against Illinois State University, University of Minnesota and then complete the trip against South Dakota State University.
With pitching and offense doing well, the main concern around the team is defense, but Ford said that will come.

“It’s a lot of fun to watch the guys finally get their feet underneath them,” Ford said.

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Posted by HeraldAdmin on Feb 26 2009. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Cody Kimball
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