No. 20 Baseball Team Raising The Bar For Top-25 Matchup At UCSB
by Rob Moseley
Editor, GoDucks.com
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Some 20 minutes had passed since the final out of Oregon's worst performance of the season, and still the UO position players were huddled in short right field, catching an earful and more from assistant coach Mark Wasikowski.
No, this wasn't following the Ducks' only loss of the season, a 10-1 shellacking at Hawaii in the season's first series. UO coach George Horton and his staff thought the team actually showed great competitive fire that day, even if the execution was lacking.
Instead, the extended postgame talking-to came following Oregon's series-opening win over New Mexico State in PK Park last week. The Ducks won 3-1, the second of what is now an ongoing six-game win streak. But the staff didn't like what it saw in the dugout.
"To a man, we thought we just showed up and threw our gloves out, were happy to be home and were the 'big, bad Ducks,'" Horton recalled this week. "That was not a personality we liked very much, and we challenged our guys — and they did something about it."
What the Ducks did was finish off a four-game sweep of the Aggies, before beating Portland on Tuesday. Now, 20th-ranked Oregon faces its toughest test yet, a three-game series at No. 22 UC Santa Barbara beginning Friday at 2 p.m.
To keep the Ducks sharp, the coaching staff has pushed the team with a vigor that belies its 8-1 start. Nobody around the program wants to see complacency set in at the onset of what could be a special season.
"When you're winning, everything seems to be going easy, everything's fun and you can get relaxed," outfielder Austin Grebeck said. "Like, 'Oh, we got this.' You think everything's going to take care of itself. But the coaches do a good job of keeping us hungry, working hard to make sure that doesn't creep in — that we're coming out every day and getting better."
Oregon won three out of four in a tough environment at Hawaii, taking the finale to kick off the six-game win streak that continued against the Aggies and Pilots. The Ducks know they'll face a tougher challenge this weekend against the Gauchos (7-1), who are coached by former UO assistant Andrew Checketts.
"We're ready," Grebeck said. "We want to see some good competition, see some good pitching, see how we stack up against guys. We think we're pretty good, and we want to see how it's going to turn out."
Owing to the presence of former UO pitching coach Checketts at the helm for UC Santa Barbara, Oregon left-hander and Friday starter Cole Irvin declined to announce the pitch count he'll operate under this week. He made public his projected pitch count prior to this previous two starts — Irvin is coming back from Tommy John surgery — and he thought the Aggies might have taken a few extra pitches in order to speed the UO ace's exit from the game.
The Gauchos figure to work counts, too, but won't have a specific target for Irvin's pitch count available. "I'm just going to expect a full start, hopefully get through six, seven innings," Irvin said.
The Ducks head to UCSB with a lineup that's accounting for nearly eight runs per game, more than two-thirds of which (47 of 69 runs) has come in the sixth inning or later. Oregon is led by leadoff man Matt Eureste (.400) and three-hole hitter Mitchell Tolman (.379), and received a shot in the arm the last three games from new starter Grebeck, who is 6-of-11 with five runs and seven RBIs since replacing the injured Steven Packard.
"I've been working hard, (and) coaches have been helping me out," Grebeck said. "I finally got an opportunity, and made the most of it."
This weekend, the Ducks hope to take advantage of the opportunity to test themselves against another top-25 team.
"Getting off to a good start is one thing, but that's not a finish line, as we like to say," Horton said. "It's a start. We'll get tested this weekend, and look at what we have to improve on — and hopefully we'll come back with three W's and have to improve on something, rather than the other way around."
