Nebraska Baseball Season Ends Not With A Bang, But A Rather Pathetic Whimper

By Oliver Vandervoort | Jun 4, 2016

The Nebraska baseball team lost 4-1 on Saturday to a Western Carolina team that surrendered 24 runs the night before and that summed up how poorly the offense played in their last two weeks of the season.

Just how bad was the Catamount’s pitching staff this season? The team posted a 5.97 ERA and Western Carolina upset its way into a conference tournament title and regional bid. That pitching staff looked every bit its shaky self when Taylor Durand walked a whopping six batters in the first two innings.

The Nebraska baseball team loaded the bases with just one out in the first two innings and couldn’t manage to score a single run. In fact the Huskers couldn’t manage to get a single hit in either of those situations.

Unfortunately for the Nebraska baseball team the Huskers pitching staff did what it’s done for most of the tournament as well. The staff hasn’t been particularly bad, but when it came to getting an out when they really needed it, they got it one batter too late. This was certainly the case when Jake Meyers allowed the first two runners to reach and then forced a double play.

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With a runner on third and two out, it looked like the Huskers were going to get out of it. Then a single scored the run to make it 1-0. Meyers, still somewhat shaky for a good portion of the game was able to gut out a rather decent performance and made the one run stand up until the Nebraska baseball team’s offense was finally able to scratch across their first run of the regionals with a Jake Schleppenbach RBI single.

Not only was that the first run the Nebraska baseball team scored in the Clemson regionals, it was the only run the Nebraska baseball team scored in the Clemson regionals. After an hour-long weather delay due to lightning, the Catamounts took a 2-1 lead and that was all they would need.

As if to add insult to injury to a team that scored just four runs in its last four games, the Nebraska baseball team hit into a whopping five double plays, including inning enders in the in the 6th, 7th and 8th innings. The ninth didn’t include a double play, but it did include a 1-2-3 inning where the team seemed just ready to go home.

The loss concluded what was a truly disappointing 0-4 run in the Big Ten and Regionals where the Nebraska baseball team barely put up a fight. Now Darin Erstad and company will have to go back to the drawing board and figure out why the Big Ten’s hottest team suddenly became epically cold. The Nebraska baseball team will have until next January to figure it out.

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