You know the one about the sun shining on a dog’s butt every once in a while? Or how a rainbow always follows a summer thunderstorm? It was kind of like that.
Yesterday afternoon, the Saint Louis University baseball team, which is in the midst of a long down swing in production which has led to a descent ending at the bottom of the Conference USA standings, traveled up to Charleston, Ill. for a game against Eastern Illinois. In a way, it was unfair. The Billikens were due like a woman in her fourth trimester. And it appeared that way from the onset.
In the top of the first, after a leadoff single by Jake Friedrich, Don Rogers hit an RBI single to start off the Bills scoring. A couple of batters, later Johnny Sweeney plated Rogers with a single of his own. And in the top of the second it was more of the same.
Eric Mueller was hit by a pitch to lead off the inning, and Kyle Wort followed him by crushing a homerun, his third of the year.
But the Bills were not done, as Ryan Murphy hit a two-out double and Rogers followed him with another RBI single. The Bills had the Panthers down 5-0 and the game had barely started.
But that all changed in the bottom half of the inning, when the Panthers knocked a lead-off homerun off Billiken starter Zach Placzek.
Placzek walked two batters and allowed a single to load the bases. He then induced a short pop up to record the first out, but the very next EIU batter lined a two-run single into left field, which cut the Bills’ lead to only two.
At this point, Kurt Struckhoff came into the game in relief and, after giving up an RBI single which made the score 5-4, he induced a inning-ending double play to get the Bills out of the jam without any more damage being done.
After exchanging runs in the fourth, Struckhoff found his groove and shut down the Panthers for the rest of the game.
The Bills gave him an insurance run in the top half of the seventh, but they proved not to need it as Struckhoff and the Bills put down EIU with relative ease after a rocky beginning.
Struckhoff got the win and improved his record to 1-2 on the year. He scattered five hits over the course of his seven innings and only allowed one earned run.
Rogers also had an incredible game, belting out four hits to go along with his two runs scored and his pair of RBIs.
Tuesday, the Bills partook in the Fourth Annual Wooden Bat Classic, a game against the Missouri Tigers at T.R. Hughes field in St. Charles. This was the fourth year for the game which features the use of wooden bats instead of the aluminum ones that are primarily used in the college ranks.
The Bills did not have a great outing against the rock-steady Tigers, and it showed on the scoreboard as the Tigers took the game 6-0.
The Tigers jumped out on the Bills early, scoring four runs in the third inning thanks to a pair of Billiken errors and they never looked back.
The Bills could manage just five hits over the course of the game and could never really seem to put together much of a threat.
The Tigers plated two more runs in the bottom of the eighth and retired the Bills in order in the top of the ninth. The Bills dug themselves in a hole early and often against the Tigers, starting with their debaucle of an inning in the third and continuing on with a couple more baserunning errors which stopped would-be Billiken rally’s dead in their tracks.
This weekend, the Billikens will travel down south to take on the Memphis Tigers in a three-game series.
The Tigers are ranked just ahead of the Bills in the C-USA standings and a couple of wins down there would pull the Bills from the depths of the cellar and provide some much needed momentum, as the Bills look to close out their schedule.
The win over EIU coupled with the loss against MU yesterday brings the Bills overall record to 16-24 for the year.
After this weekend, they will have only six more conference games before the conference tournament, and right now they could use some kind of spark.
