Baseball team to face grounded Hawks this weekend

Twitter
Facebook

 Email This Post
Reddit
Digg

Tell us what you think!
Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.

The University of Maine baseball team will stay home for a second straight weekend to play a pair of doubleheaders against the University of Hartford at Mahaney Diamond.

The Black Bears are 26-12 overall, with an 8-4 America East conference record, putting the team one game behind the first place Catamounts of the University of Vermont (9-3). Hartford is 12-23 overall and 4-8 in America East.

Hartford is coming off of a 1-3 weekend performance against Northeastern and is mired in a 2-8 record in the team’s last 10 games. The problem for the Hawks this season has been poor pitching, low-lighted by a conference high 7.65 team ERA. But the team has had little problem at the plate. The Hawks own a .297 team average that rivals only UMaine’s conference-high .328 clip.

For the Black Bears, the most important part of the pitching staff is not the knockout 1-2 punch that is Mike Collar and Mike MacDonald, it’s the two men that UMaine will send to the hill in the third and fourth starter roles.

“It’s been a tough spot for us all season,” UMaine coach Paul Kostacopolous said. “Laganere has steadily improved as our three, but after that, we really don’t even have a fourth starter. We’ve trotted a handful of different guys out there.”

After another solid outing last Sunday against Albany, Rich Laganere has run his record out to a respectable 5-3, but he still has a bloated but dropping ERA of 6.37. But as coach Kosty said, Greg Creek and Adam Lebel have gotten three starts each while Paul Bruder has started five trying to nail down the fourth starter spot.

Offensively, the Black Bears have an emerging star in Simon Williams. Still uncaught with 15 stolen bases, Williams leads the team in runs scored with 49 (16 ahead of his closest teammate, Mike Ross). Williams, with seven home runs, is one behind Joe Drapeau for the team lead. He is hitting at a scorching .392 pace, good enough for third on the team.

Alain Picard continues to hit the ball as if he has something personal against it. Although his 28 game-hitting streak was snapped against the Vermont Catamounts, leading to a 3-22 slump in the short term thereafter, his average still stands at .400 with 16 doubles, five home runs and 41 RBIs.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 2nd, 2002, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.