Offense, Pitching Building Confidence

Our trip to Florida was very successful, winning all nine collegiate games, and playing well against the Minnesota Twins Rookie Team, which consists of all first year professionals. As far as the regularly scheduled games are concerned, we hit the ball extremely well. I think that because our hitting was somewhat of a concern after leaving Myrtle Beach, it’s a big confidence builder that we came down here and did as well at the plate as we have.

The first game we played against Scranton was a fairly sloppy one. We made four errors on defense, which is unacceptable. Getting the win though was important to start the trip off on a good note. The next day, we swept Bethel, who is a very good hitting team. We played real well both games and since that was probably the best team we played on the trip, it was good to get those two wins early in the week. It was especially nice to win the first game so close after having to come back from an early 4-0 hole. The next day, we picked up two more wins against Lakeland. In the first game it took a little too long to start hitting. The score does not show how poorly we hit because we scored a lot of runs at the end of the game. We got two great pitching performances though from our staff.

We shut down the next day for our day off and it was a good day to get some rest to prepare for the back end of our trip. Thursday, we played against the Twins team where we let the game slip away in the bottom of the ninth on a sacrifice fly. We also had a JV game against SUNY Fredonia, where we got to see what a lot of the guys who don't get a lot of chances to play to see what they can do in game situations. There were definitely some bright spots in that game as well as this entire week.

We’re fortunate bringing our winning streak to 13 games, which is a school record. We wrapped up the trip with sweeps of Minnesota-Morris and Millikin. Our offense continued to roll and the pitching has been solid.

#17 = Matt Burns