Missouri baseball head coach Steve Bieser was going to pull out all the stops to secure a win on Sunday. In danger of being swept by the Georgia Bulldogs and falling further behind in the SEC standings, the second-year skipper’s plan was to throw the best arms available to salvage a victory.
The problem is, he never got the chance. Bryce Montes de Oca made his return to the starting rotation after making five appearances out of the bullpen, and the redshirt junior allowed five earned runs over three innings, his worst start of the season.
The coup de grâce came in the third inning, when the Bulldogs’ first baseman Adam Sasser slugged a three-run, no doubt home run to right field. One of Sasser’s four home runs in the series — all of which sailed in the direction of the Devine Pavilion — it vaulted Georgia to a 7-1 defeat of the Tigers and a series sweep.
“The biggest thing I saw was that he just didn’t have a put-away pitch,” Bieser said. “When guys got to two strikes, he couldn’t put them away. He could jump ahead and just couldn’t finish the guys. There just wasn’t much there for him to work with.”
Montes de Oca was slated to pitch three innings anyway, but the early deficit made Bieser’s plan to use Tyler LaPlante and Andy Toelken to keep the game close moot.
The loss drops Missouri to 9-15 in the SEC and ensures it cannot finish the regular season with a winning conference record. If the Tigers manage to win their remaining six SEC games, they will finish 15-15, but with the way they’ve been playing, it’s hard to foresee that.
A team that has played smart baseball with sharp defense all year inexplicably lost focus numerous times against Georgia. Missouri is second in the SEC with a .982 fielding percentage and first in putouts, yet it committed four errors on the weekend.
The most glaring account came in the sixth inning, when Trey Harris made what looked like a good throw home after a C.J. Smith single that was puzzlingly cut off by Brian Sharp, allowing Mason Meadows to score. Two batters later, LaPlante induced what should have been an inning-ending groundout, but freshman Mark Vierling made an errant throw to first base, which drew Sharp off the bag and let another run cross. The two runs the Bulldogs scored in the inning made it 7-0, and the Missouri offense was unable to make up for the gaffes.
“I think it was just an off weekend,” senior Matt Berler said. “We press a little bit on defense, and those things happen. It’s baseball. It’s just going back to what we do — the fundamentals of catching and throwing.”
MU didn’t record a hit until the fourth inning, when Alex Samples hit a single. Its first run came in the bottom of the sixth, when Berler drove in one with a base hit to left field. But by that point, it was all said and done. With just three hits in nine innings, there was simply no jolt in the Tigers’ bats.
After another series loss, the importance of the next two are clear. In next weekend’s South Carolina series, Missouri has an opportunity to bolster it’s resume against a strong team that’s won its last four conference games. But it’s also clear there needs to be a change in performance if that’s going to happen. Bieser put it best: “We picked a bad weekend to be bad.”
“We’re just going to take it one game at a time,” LaPlante said. “We got to make sure we start out on Friday — get that first one — and then go from there. We got T.J. (Sikkema) going out there, and I have all the confidence in the world in him. We’ve just got to make sure we don’t get ahead of ourselves.”
