Broncos look for a sunny future after spring trip

By Scott Sierzenga
Western Herald

The Western Michigan University baseball team returned from their spring trip with only two wins, but it was how those two wins came to be that will set the tone for the rest of their season.

The Broncos (2-8) won their first game against the then 7-1 Villanova Wildcats after losing their first six games of the season. WMU’s Ryan McMillan hit a walk-off single in the bottom of the ninth to beat the Wildcats, who had successfully beaten many of the opponents the Brown and Gold struggled against earlier in the week. The win proved to be huge for WMU.

“It was huge for two reasons,” Bronco head coach Randy Ford said. “We had the heartbreaking loss at Dallas Baptist [University] in the last inning and second, is after six of seven games without a win, you start to get a monkey on your back. You need to get a win so you can relax and play.”

Despite their huge win, the Broncos struggled where they thought they would prevail: their pitching. The Brown and Gold gave up 108 runs in 10 games, 100 of which were earned. The WMU pitching staff was also allowing 14.1 hits per game.

“Pitching, we gave up too many hits, one-and-a-half to two per inning,” Ford said. “We’re throwing strikes but we need to get outs.”

Looking forward to their three game series this weekend against Oral Roberts University, the Broncos have a couple of ideas in mind on how to tweak their pitching strategy.

“We are going to change it up and attack with the fastball and see if they can hit it,” captain Eric Heckaman said.

Defensively, the Broncos were stout, having an errorless streak of four games in the middle of their trip. They will need to continue to play quality defense if they hope to compete with the power of Oral Roberts this weekend.

“We had zero errors in four games,” sophomore Jack Scanlon said. “It helped a lot keeping us in games and it gives our pitchers a sense of security.”

Scanlon finished the week with a .350 batting average, good for second on the team. Scanlon is coming off Tommy John surgery and has been splitting time in the outfield, but has been a huge factor both offensively and defensively for the Broncos.

A pleasant surprise for Western Michigan was how prolific their offense was, averaging 5.9 runs a game and keeping WMU close in many of the games on their spring trip.

McMillan leads all Broncos with his .380 average, two homeruns and eight RBIs in the sixth of seventh spot in the lineup. Many of the younger players were able to contribute both at the top and bottom of the order. Freshman Jimmy Martinez started four games for the Broncos and is hitting .438 with a homerun.

“I think the bottom of our lineup stood up pretty well,” Scanlon said. “We did pretty well getting runners over and getting them in.”

It is clear that the Broncos will come to rely on their younger players, like sophomore Casey Hall, who picked up the Bronco’s second win, throwing seven strong innings allowing one run.

“I think you’re going to find every year you need help from two or three of the youngsters,” Ford said. “When you take freshman, sophomores, juniors, seniors and grab three of four impact players from each class, you need help from the freshmen to round it off.”

These young guys and pitching will continue to play a prominent role heading into the weekend to face a quality Oral Roberts team, which has been the third winningest program in the country since 2004. But having success always come back to the same thing: practice.

“The next week or two of practice will be key for the rest of the season,” Heckaman said.

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Posted by heraldstaff on Mar 10 2010. 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

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