In a lost weekend, the Hawaii baseball team squandered another strong pitching performance in Sunday’s 2-1 road defeat to seventh-ranked Long Beach State at Blair Field.
The Dirtbags swept the three-game series to improve to 35-16 overall and a Big West-leading 18-3. The ’Bows dropped to 26-22 and 8-13 after suffering their fifth consecutive loss.
The ’Bows were without center fielder and lead-off hitter Dylan Vchulek, who was scratched because of a foot injury.
“He and the trainer came up to me literally three minutes before lineup exchange, so we made the choice not to play him today,” UH coach Mike Trapasso said in a telephone interview. Vchulek’s foot will be further examined when the ’Bows return to Honolulu today. They finish the regular season with a three-game series against UC Santa Barbara beginning Thursday at Les Murakami Stadium.
“That was tough losing our sparkplug and leading hitter,” Trapasso said. “That didn’t help.”
Left fielder Marcus Doi batted leadoff in place of Vchulek, right fielder Alex Fitchett was in center, and Adam Fogel went from left to right. Fogel’s fourth home run of his freshman season, a solo shot in the seventh, helped the ’Bows avoid their first shutout since opening night. Three home runs accounted for four of the ’Bows’ six runs in this series.
Sunday’s script was a rewrite of Friday’s game, in which the ’Bows fell by an identical 2-1 score. This time, Dave Smith, a sinkerball specialist, allowed six hits and one run in eight innings. He did not walk a batter.
Smith launched fastballs, sinkers and sliders at near 90 mph. “He was able to throw that slider at any time,” Trapasso said. “He was throwing it at 3-2 (counts), he was throwing it at 2-0. It’s just a good pitch. We just struggled with figuring it out.”
Smith induced 12 groundouts.
Chris Rivera, yet another strong-armed Dirtbag, pitched a scoreless ninth inning for his 10th save.
“Their pitching was outstanding,” Trapasso said. “Whatever’s right below outstanding, that’s where we were.”
Jackson Rees allowed two runs — one unearned — in 62⁄3 innings for the ’Bows. Dylan Thomas was perfect in his four-batter, 11-pitch outing.
The Dirtbags opened the scoring on Ramsey Romano’s RBI single in the first. Romano then scooted to second on Rees’ errant pick-off attempt, and scored on Brock Lundquist’s single to right.
“It was frustrating,” Trapasso said. “If you go into a series against the seventh-ranked team in the country and you hold them to two runs in two of the games but have nothing to show for it, that’s a shame. The guys competed their tails off, and we pitched our tails off in two of the games. We just weren’t able to score. It’s hard to win when you only score one. Then you have to throw a shutout.”
Romano and Jarren Duran each had two hits for the Dirtbags.
No UH player had more than one hit. Two innings after hitting his homer, Fogel nearly had a hana hou when he belted a drive that was caught on the warning track in left.
“We’ve got to be able to score, and we just didn’t do that against their pitching this weekend,” Trapasso said.
