Nebraska (7-10) vs. UCLA (15-4) Series Game Thread

[Bugeaters1]

 

[AuroranHusker]

 

[hskr4life]

Three Q1 opportunities on deck and over the next week we will have 3 Q1, 3 Q2, and 2 Q3 opportunities. A chance to move the RPI needle for sure.

[brfrad]

The way I look at this weekend

 

0 wins not good

1 win okay

2 wins tickled pink

3 wins doing cartwheels

 

1 - 0 UCLA in the middle of the 3rd.

[brfrad]

Missed a golden opportunity in the 4th.  Home run by UCLA, and now trail 2 - 0 after 4.

[brfrad]

Another missed opportunity.   Although, at least this time we put a good swing at it.

[brfrad]

This Home Plate ump needs to get over himself.  He just follows Stone to the dugout barking at Nebraska for doing their home run celebration.   Also, has tossed T J Coats.  This is going to be a very long weekend with a joke of an umpire crew.  Tied at 2 in the middle of the 6th.

[brfrad]

5 - 2 UCLA going to the bottom of the 8th.

[brfrad]

Bottom half of the inning, very few called strikes.  Top half of the inning, everything is called a strike.

 

Carey has had very good at bats tonight.   Finally gets rewarded with a hit.

[brfrad]

Frost struck out on a pitch a foot outside.

[brfrad]

Had chances.  Not very fundamental tonight.  Baserunning awful.  Not totally Carey's fault.  1st base coach has to help.  

 

Home plate ump tonight was awful.  Tight strike zone early both ways.  Not a problem.  Later on it stayed tight on one end.  It expanded on the other end.  The most atrocious part of the night was him following Stone to the dugout after his home run.  Didn't have a problem when UCLA hit their home run.

[hskr4life]

3 hours ago, brfrad said:

Frost struck out on a pitch a foot outside.

Awful, Awful call— we had 2 on too. Tying runner would have been on with 1 away.

 

 

[hskr4life]

Man— my biggest worry watching these guys so far is that we have a little bit of talent hitting and a little bit pitching. But we don’t have a dominant one or the other to compensate for one lacking a little in the talent department.

 

It feels like we’re going to come out of weekend 2 at 1-5 in the conference and be in a deep hole to even make the conference tournament. Losing Mac hurt for sure, but the signs were already there a little bit.

[AuroranHusker]

Lost again, 3-11, now NU really has gotta find a way to pull out the finale to salvage something from this 3-game set.

 

[throwback]

14 hours ago, hskr4life said:

Man— my biggest worry watching these guys so far is that we have a little bit of talent hitting and a little bit pitching. But we don’t have a dominant one or the other to compensate for one lacking a little in the talent department.

 

It feels like we’re going to come out of weekend 2 at 1-5 in the conference and be in a deep hole to even make the conference tournament. Losing Mac hurt for sure, but the signs were already there a little bit.

Might be tough to make the 12-team B1G tourney at the rate we're going. We don't look like anything close to a .500 team at this point. I mean we're 0-4-1 in the first five weekend "series". Even though we've been on the road for all but one weekend, that's atrocious. 

 

The B1G is an offensive league this year, and even if your team emphasizes pitching, you'd better be able to score some. Our offense is really bad - we're not walking enough, we're not stringing hits / "passing the baton", we're not good on the basepaths, we're not really hitting for power or squaring pitches up often enough, and we're struggling on the rare occasions where we get guys in scoring position. Other than that, things are going fine.

 

I mean Stone had all of our RBIs thru the first 16 innings out in LA - and he only recently rejoined the lineup. This is Mike Anderson-level-offense bad.

 

Bottom line: Our veteran returning position players just aren't producing. The couple of veteran transfers we brought in are not hitting either. And our 2 most veteran bullpen guys were awful with the game on the line Friday and Saturday.  So many older guys who are fighting it.  Really disappointing that the coaches can't seem to put their fingers on what's going wrong and get the ship righted.

Looking ahead, USC just won the first two of its series at Michigan. We are in deep, deep trouble.  I never saw this coming. Losing Mac hurts, but even if he's here these last two weekends, we probably have the same record because we can't score.

 

Edited 16 hours ago by throwback

[hskr4life]

10 hours ago, throwback said:

Might be tough to make the 12-team B1G tourney at the rate we're going. We don't look like anything close to a .500 team at this point. I mean we're 0-4-1 in the first five weekend "series". Even though we've been on the road for all but one weekend, that's atrocious. 

 

The B1G is an offensive league this year, and even if your team emphasizes pitching, you'd better be able to score some. Our offense is really bad - we're not walking enough, we're not stringing hits / "passing the baton", we're not good on the basepaths, we're not really hitting for power or squaring pitches up often enough, and we're struggling on the rare occasions where we get guys in scoring position. Other than that, things are going fine.

 

I mean Stone had all of our RBIs thru the first 16 innings out in LA - and he only recently rejoined the lineup. This is Mike Anderson-level-offense bad.

 

Bottom line: Our veteran returning position players just aren't producing. The couple of veteran transfers we brought in are not hitting either. And our 2 most veteran bullpen guys were awful with the game on the line Friday and Saturday.  So many older guys who are fighting it.  Really disappointing that the coaches can't seem to put their fingers on what's going wrong and get the ship righted.

Looking ahead, USC just won the first two of its series at Michigan. We are in deep, deep trouble.  I never saw this coming. Losing Mac hurts, but even if he's here these last two weekends, we probably have the same record because we can't score.

 

Baseball is such a confidence sport on both sides too and we totally lost what confidence we should have had after week 1. If we could just string some wins together….

[brfrad]

I thought that the 2 Wichita State series would be the start of something.  It doesn't seem to get us any momentum.  3 - 0 lead after 3.  Now, 3 - 3 after 5.  3 - 23 with RISP this series is not good.

Edited 8 hours ago by brfrad

[brfrad]

Make that 3 - 24.

 

Now, down 4 - 3.  Yep.  This is going to be a long, long, long, long season.

[brfrad]

Make that 5 - 3 UCLA.  Odds of us scoring 2 more runs today are .000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%

[brfrad]

Our team is NOT good.

[brfrad]

18 hours ago, throwback said:

Might be tough to make the 12-team B1G tourney at the rate we're going. We don't look like anything close to a .500 team at this point. I mean we're 0-4-1 in the first five weekend "series". Even though we've been on the road for all but one weekend, that's atrocious. 

 

I have lost hope in us making the tournament.   It's not happening.  This might be frustration talking, but we look very bad.  

 

Caught a break on the check swing, but probably won't take advantage. 

[brfrad]

Who finishes with more wins?  The basketball team or the baseball team?  I don't know which way I'm leaning right now.  In the moment,  I'm saying the baseball team is not going to get over 17 wins.

[brfrad]

Look at a fastball RIGHT down the middle for strike 3.  Sounds about the way we are hitting right now.

[throwback]

I thought the approach - at least early - was better. Now the bar is pretty low - the first 4 guys still K'd. But at least we were fouling off some tough pitches and were getting deep into the counts. Felt like we had more swinging strikes/foul balls in the first half of the game than we've been having. We were actually competing at the plate, which we haven't done a lot of this season.

 

However, I can't count the number of so-so bullpen guys that have completely shut us down this season. The competitive at-bats seemed to fall off once UCLA tied it.

 

Overall, it's still pretty awful. I would live with a higher K rate if we were racking up extra base hits. When you don't hit for power, the Ks are killers.

 

Someone will have to explain to me how we don't use our one of our most pro-ready arms in Broderick all weekend. Why not bring him in in the 5th or 6th when the game was getting away from us? No point in saving a closer for the 9th only when you can't get late leads.

 

I will say UCLA is pretty good. They look the part. Right now, we don't.

 

Pepperdine is pretty bad and they start conference play this upcoming weekend, so we'll probably see a lot of young arms from them, as they'll save their best guys for the weekend. Gotta get two in the midweek, but we'll see. Tough to be optimistic. To even get to 30 wins, we have to go 23-14 from here. Doesn't seem likely with this offense.

 

Edited 4 hours ago by throwback

[AuroranHusker]

Nebraska, man, it has divvied out a lot of painful men's sports right now.