"We're quite honestly not that bad," coach Joe Carbone said.
Why did the 23-year-coach feel the need to defend Ohio in this manner? Because, well, the Bobcats have played fairly bad over their four-game losing streak.
The slide started last Wednesday against Xavier. The Bobcats blew a 5-1 lead by committing four errors that led directly to runs. Against Western Michigan over the weekend, Ohio just couldn't swing the bat. As they stand now, the Bobcats are back under .500 on the season (15-17) and even worse in MAC play (2-7).
"Everyone's gone through this," Carbone said. "There's some teams that started out 0-11 and 0-10. We've lost four in a row, so we just gotta right the ship."
Some of the Bobcats' pitchers have been allowing the opposing team's leadoff hitters to reach base. And, as Carbone will tell you, when a runner's on first with no outs, he'll score more than half of the time (actually, 65 percent of the time was the statistic he provided me last week).
"Baseball's a game of streaks," Carbone said. "You got losing streaks, you got winning streaks, you know? We just need to get a little bit better at everything we do."
Ohio has a chance to get back on the right track today against Eastern Kentucky. Like most of its mid-week opponents, the Colonels have a losing record. Even though Carbone plays many reserve players during these games, the Bobcats usually don't have trouble scoring.
The test for Ohio today, in my opinion, will be to see if the team can clean up its defense and stay error-free for an entire game, which it hasn't done since late March.
"We're close," Carbone said. "We just gotta get better, and most of it's due to our youth. We're inexperienced, we have a lot of new guys."
