Baseball tunes up for weekend with 5-0 win against Kalamazoo College
With the regular season winding down baseball used Tuesday's 5-0 win against Kalamazoo College as a tune-up for this weekend's Mid-American Conference series against Akron.
CMU will play at Oakland on Wednesday before the home weekend series with the Zips.
"This is just another opportunity for our guys to get better," said head coach Steve Jaksa. "We were able to move a couple of guys around ... still playing a lot a guys, but still have a couple of guys not 100 percent."
Freshman Adam Aldred was on his game as he started on the mound. The left-handed pitcher went eight innings and allowed five hits while striking out seven and in the shutout.
"I didn't know I was going to go as long as I did and I got some good defensive support behind me," Aldred said. "Usually I go off-speed, but today my fastball was really working and I managed to stick with that and work ahead in counts."
With back-to-back midweek games before the weekend MAC series, it's important that the starters have a solid outing to preserve the bullpen, and Aldred did just that, improving his record 2-0 and his ERA to 1.44.
"We were hoping (Aldred) could go deep and he ended going into the eighth inning," Jaksa said.
The Chippewas used smallball and took advantage of five Hornets' errors to plate their runs.
"I thought we were a little up and down quite frankly (at the plate)," Jaksa said. "I thought we gave a few at-bats away ... just a little lack of discipline."
The team did not record a hit until senior Tom Lally laid down a bunt single in the second inning to bring in a run. Despite that being the first hit of the game, the RBI brought in the third run of the game after a balk brought one in during the first inning and a pair of errors brought in another in the second.
Lally added a RBI sacrifice fly in the sixth after freshman Zack Fields hit a RBI single to left field earlier in the inning.
"It was a good win," Jaksa said. "We were a little dull in innings three through five, then I though we swung the bats better down the stretch."
Freshman left-handed pitcher Jimmy McNamara will get the start Wednesday against the Golden Grizzlies, first pitch is set for 3:00 p.m.
