With no outs in the third inning of Boston College baseball’s matchup against No. 15 Connecticut on Wednesday, BC head coach Mike Gambino pulled starting pitcher Luke Delongchamp. One out later, Gambino switched out reliever Charlie Coon for Joey Ryan in another pitching change. And then came another, and another, and another.
Eight BC pitchers stepped up to the mound on Wednesday night, but none of them could get the job done, and UConn (29–7, 6–0 Big East) cruised to an 8–0 victory over BC (15–22, 3–15 Atlantic Coast).
“We’ve played some games—like this past weekend—where we played hard and played well, but we didn’t like the results, but I was happy with how hard the guys played [and] how hard the guys fought,” Gambino said after Wednesday’s game. “I didn’t really love our lack of effort, lack of concentration, I don’t know what it was, but I didn’t love who we were tonight.”
The Huskies opened the scoring in the top of the second inning and never looked back. With two outs, UConn’s Matthew Donlan singled and reached second base on a wild pitch from Delongchamp. In the next at-bat, Christian Fedko singled to score Donlan and put the Huskies up 1–0.
In the top of the third, UConn’s offense heated up. Bryan Padilla opened the inning with a double to left center, and Erik Stock reached on a fielder’s choice in the next at-bat, advancing Padilla to third. Then Coon came in, but he quickly threw a wild pitch that scored Padilla. The Huskies scored twice more in the inning off an RBI double from Donlan and left the inning up 4–0.
“I don’t want to take anything away from UConn, … but we didn’t have the level of fight tonight that I wanted to have,” Gambino said. “So to switch gears, I want to get back to playing harder, playing better baseball.”
After Delongchamp’s two innings of work, all seven of BC’s relievers threw for no more than 1.2 innings. Gambino said that the frequent rotation in the bullpen was a part of BC’s game plan entering the matchup, but it was also partly situational.
“We sort of had a feel that Luke was going to go three-ish and then kind of boom, boom, boom all the way through, so it was kind of mapped out with those guys,” he said. “Especially having not played since Friday, some of those guys we needed to make sure to get in the game and get them ready for the weekend, too.”
UConn tacked on one more run in the seventh and three runs in the eighth to close out the game, as BC failed to score once and recorded only one hit in the outing.
The Eagles look ahead to a packed schedule in the upcoming weeks and will play eight games in 10 days starting with their series opener against Virginia Tech on Friday. Though Gambino said his roster is spread thin due to injuries, and many players are battling through pain, he said he enjoys a busy schedule.
“That’s one of the awesome things about baseball, is getting to play everyday,” Gambino said. “As you can see, we’re really banged up … so first focus is trying to keep everyone healthy, but I love playing everyday.I think we all love playing everyday.”
Featured Image by Aditya Rao / Heights Staff
