ASU Baseball: Devils Drop Final Game
By Mike Slifer
Sunday, the ASU baseball team lost to the UofA by a score of 6-1. The loss prevented a 3 game sweep of the Wildcats by the Sun Devils.
ASU, once again took two out of three from a conference opponent. While a series win is ideal, the Sun Devils are starting to show a pattern of not playing well on Sundays. This is the fourth series where the Sun Devils came out strong on Friday/Saturday only to let the Sunday game slip away.
Coach Tim Esmay has got to be miffed about this trend. He doesn’t want a solid team–he wants a dominant team–a championship team. And championship teams finish off their opponents. Esmay is probably more concerned with the effort than the result. In Sunday’s series finale, ASU looked disinterested. They had a lack of concentration and seemed distracted. They put together bad “at-bats” and committed several mental errors.
It’s a subtle thing to pick up on, but trained baseball eyes can tell that ASU was in a hurry to finish the game and head home. The thirst to beat their rivals for a third straight time was apparently already quenched.
Coaches get paid to worry about such things and motivate their players. No doubt coach Esmay will attempt to do that. But the overall picture is still pretty good right now for ASU.
Devils in Detail believes that taking 2 out of 3 games every conference series (especially on the road) is a winning formula. However, if this team wants to make a legitimate post season run, they’ll need to get fired up and “locked in” mentally.
Their schedule is favorable for the rest of the season. ASU fans undoubtedly hope that the effort from here on out will be more worthy of the maroon and gold.