Oklahoma Baseball Losers of 7 of 8; Are Sooners Down for the Count?
By Chip Rouse
The bats finally came back to life for Oklahoma baseball on Friday in the opener of a three-game weekend series against the not great, but good enough Kansas Jayhawks.
The Sooners pounded out a dozen hits that produced 10 runs on Friday at L. Dale Mitchell Park, but even that production wasn’t enough as Kansas scored 15 times on 16 hits against seven Oklahoma pitchers and handed the struggling Sooners their sixth straight loss.
Things didn’t get any better on Saturday, with the Jayhawks sending Oklahoma to its seventh consecutive loss, 5-2, Kanas right-handed starter Jackson Goddard went seven innings, striking out seven and yielding just six hits to the host Sooners.
Oklahoma overcame a one-run deficit late in the game in Sunday’s series finale to pull out a 7-6 victory and avoid going down for an eighth consecutive game. But the Sooners, now 28-15 on the season, have still fallen victim in eight of their last 11 games. It’s getting hard to fathom that this is the same team that just a couple of weeks ago stood at 26-6 overall.
Head coach Pete Hughes said heading into the Kansas series that his team was going through an extremely rough patch, and was just going to have to grind through the losing skid and would come through it stronger on the other side.
If the Sooners are going to come out of their current funk stronger, it’s going to have to begin in the batter’s box. In its last two Big 12 series, against Texas and Kansas, OU’s offense recorded more than eight hits just once and managed just five hits two other times.
In the series last weekend at home against Kansas, the Sooner pitching lost its way, yielding a total of 26 earned runs on 30 hits.
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And in a midweek game before the Kansas series, Dallas Baptist defeated the Sooners in a 16-12 slugfest, scoring 16 runs against OU pitching on 16 hits.
After losing three of four games last week, Oklahoma continued its free fall in the national rankings, this time dropping from No. 22 to completely out of the USA Today Top 25 Coaches Poll.
A month ago, Oklahoma was among the leaders in the Big 12 in both hitting and pitching. As of last weekend’s games, however, the Sooners are fourth in the conference with a team batting average of .278 through all games and a staff ERA of 3.96.
Those numbers are even further south against Big 12 opponents. OU hitters are batting just .234 in their 12 conference games, third worst in the league, and the pitching is giving up 4.63 earned runs a game.
The upcoming schedule isn’t about to give the Sooners any relief, either. Oklahoma’s 12 remaining games in the regular-season schedule are all against Big 12 teams, beginning with back-to-back road series at West Virginia and Kansas State.
Oklahoma is at home for three games with league-leading TCU May 12-14 and closes out the regular season with Bedlam and three games with Oklahoma State (one game in Tulsa and two at Bricktown in Oklahoma City).
The collective overall record of the four teams remaining on the Sooners’ schedule is currently 98-60, but just 30-30 in Big 12 games.
Only Texas (55) has scored fewer runs than Oklahoma (56) in Big 12 games. West Virginia, TCU and Oklahoma State, all straight ahead on the schedule for the Sooners, each have scored 27 or more runs than Oklahoma against Big 12 opponents.
The Sooners are currently holding down the No. 5 spot in the Big 12 standings with a 6-6 record. If they lose two or more games at West Virginia this weekend, however, they could find themselves all the way down to seventh in a nine-team conference.
While OU is far from done in baseball this season, the prognosis is not real encouraging unless the Sooners are able to seal off the air that is pouring out of their balloon and save what’s left of the season.
Sooner baseball is fast approaching the danger zone, if it isn’t aren’t already there.