Granted, when you give up 17 runs, you're not going to win a whole lot of games, but after a quick glance at the live stats from last night's game, I present to you this:
In the 2nd inning - Rawdow is thrown out at 3rd for the final out of the inning, just after we score our 1st run of the game, which he just drove in. We may not have scored another run that inning, but baseball is a game of momentum and that killed any type of rally we could have had there.
In the 3rd inning - Hogue should have been picked off at 1st (or got himself into another run-down), instead their pitcher makes a wild throw to 1B and he takes 2nd & 3rd base. Hogue then proceeds to get picked off at 3rd base, giving us our 2nd out of the inning (killing our momentum again) and the next batter, of course, strikes out.
In the 5th inning - Connor Powers leads off with a double. He then gets thrown out at 3rd base on a ground ball to the short stop, making the 1st out aGAIN at 3rd base. Rawdow gets caught stealing 2nd to end the inning. How do you get thrown out at 3rd when the ball is hit to the short-stop, when there's no outs in the inning and nobody on 1st that's forcing you to run to 3B??</p>
In the 6th inning - Sneed gets thrown out at 2nd trying to stretch a single into a double, while he just batted in a run. Another momentum killer.
So, we had 3 people get thrown out at 3rd base (just last night), and 5 runners overall, but this was not the problem? We lost by 5 runs and had 5 guys thrown out on the base paths. I would argue that in every one of those instances, they were HUGE momentum killers for our guys. Like I said, we still may not have won the game, but to keep dismissing the sheer stupidity that is our base-running and blaming every ****** little thing about our baseball program on Polk is ridiculous. We run the bases like a little league team. That is on Cohen. I sai this in the thread on Sunday - there is a difference in playing aggressive and playing stupid. We have played a lot of stupid baseball so far this season!</p>