The University of Houston will be hosting the Conference-USA Baseball Tournament come the last week of May. But while it may be hosting the event, it’s becoming ever more possible that it won’t actually be playing in the tournament.
Only six teams qualify for the post-season tournament, the first of several steps to making it to the College World Series. And as the Cougars came into a weekend series with the Tulane Green Wave, they were in a three-way tie for the sixth and final position with Tulane and UAB. But due to tiebreakers, the Coogs were the seventh team, on the outside looking in at a tourney slot. What they wanted, what they needed, more than anything, was a series win over the Green Wave. ย
But as the great philosopher Mick Jagger once wrote, “you can’t always get what you want.” And no matter how much they tried, they just couldn’t get what they needed.
They got the series off to a good start, getting a 9-7 win that was
powered by second baseman Ryan Still. His three-run home run in the
fourth inning, the first of his career, put the Cougars up for good at
6-5, and his ninth-inning diving catch in short right field for the
second out helped to preserve the team’s tight lead.
“I just got
lucky that he hung a curveball right there,” Still said of his homer.
“I was just trying to get [the ball to the] outfield, and I got enough
of it to get it out. So it was good.”
But what the Cougars
didn’t get, again, was a quality outing from their starting pitcher,
something that they failed to get, also once again, for the entire
weekend. Michael Goodnight failed to get through the fourth inning on
Friday. William Kankel got pulled in the midst of a disastrous seventh
inning on Saturday, and Eric Brooks didn’t make it through five on
Sunday.
“We’ve kind of found our niche there, I guess,” coach
Rayner Noble said Friday night. “It’s really tough watching just go out
there and implode, walk guys, and hit guys. There’s not much we can do
about it. It’s just a mindset. The thing is, we just battled, and to
overcome all that, and to win a game, that’s something.”
But that
wasn’t the case on Saturday or Sunday, and if the Coogs end up not
making the tournament, then they can look at the seventh inning on
Saturday as perhaps being that final nail in the coffin.
Tulane
was ahead 2-1 to start the inning, and the UH starter, Kankel, was pitching
his best game of the season. He hit the first Tulane batter of the
inning. Then he fielded a sac bunt attempt and threw the ball into
right field. Then he walked the next batter to load the bases.
Kankel’s night was over, but it was too late as Tulane went on to score
seven runs on just three hits. Tulane then went on to win 13-2.
“I
think what it is, he didn’t stay in the strike zone,” Noble said of
Kankel. “And a costly error there on a bunt. You just can’t make those
kind of mistakes in a tight ballgame. You can’t walk the bases loaded,
make an error. You can’t do any of that stuff. You’re going to run
yourself into a loss.”
That stuff continued on Sunday. Not only
did starter Brooks give up four runs, but the bullpen and defense failed
to keep the Cougars in the game as they took the 8-6 loss to drop
behind Tulane and into eighth place in the conference standings with a
7-11 record (20-26 for the season) — the loss dropped them behind
Tulane, ECU and UAB who are tied for the final tourney spot with 8-10
conference records.
The game was tied at 4-4 going into the
sixth inning, but defensive lapses and wild pitches allowed Tulane to
score three runs and go ahead 7-4 as Tulane took advantage of two errors
and two wild pitches. he Coogs made a valiant comeback effort in the
ninth inning, scoring two runs, but Austin Gracey struck out with two
men on and two outs to end the game.
“We just gave the game away,
basically,” Noble said.ย “That’s how it feels. Our pitchers went out
there and did an admirable job. They weren’t great, but they did
enough. The defensive side of it just let us down. A series like this,
when you have poor pitching on one evening and poor defense on the
next, you can pretty much rely on the results that we had.”
The
Cougars have just six regular season conference games remaining this
season. And unless some kind of miracle happens, the only way they’re
going to get to the conference tournament is to start buying some
tickets so they can sit in the seats of their home field and watch the
other teams play.
This article appears in May 6-12, 2010.
