The MSU baseball team’s postseason hopes were shattered this weekend in State College, Pa., after it dropped four straight games to Penn State.
“We certainly are disappointed,” MSU head baseball coach Ted Mahan said. “We did not make the Big Ten playoffs, (but) we felt it was in our reach.”
The Spartans’ chances of sliding into the sixth seed of the Big Ten Tournament hinged on winning three of the four weekend games against the Nittany Lions.
Senior catcher Rick Court said he felt the team had a good chance of taking three games against Penn State because MSU was on a roll heading into the weekend. The Spartans had won nine of their last 10 games, including three wins over Michigan last week.
“When we got here (to Pennsylvania), we were sky-high,” Court said. “We were on cloud nine. We knew we had a good chance (to win three games). We battled our butts off, but that’s just how it ended up.”
The team got off to a slow start Friday by losing the series opener 12-11. MSU dropped both games in Saturday’s doubleheader by scores of 6-3 and 8-7 and then, having already been eliminated from postseason play, capped off the series and season Sunday with a 10-1 loss.
In addition to walking seven batters and committing four errors in Sunday’s game, Mahan said the team failed to hustle.
“Today we did not play hard, we played very poor,” he said Sunday. “We just really played uninspired, which was disappointing. We were really flat in all facets (of the game).”
The series concluded the Spartans’ season, giving them a final mark of 29-28 and 9-18 in the conference, while the four wins over MSU boosted the Nittany Lions to 27-26 and 15-11 in the Big Ten.
“We hoped we would win our 30th game (of the season) but we had a four-game losing streak at the end,” Mahan said. “We thought that was enough incentive, but it did not work out that way.”
Court said despite the four-game losing streak and the team’s failure to make the Big Ten Tournament, there was a silver lining to the season.
“We obviously did not finish the way we wanted,” Court said. “We finished on a bad note but there was a lot of good stuff to take out (of the season), especially for the younger guys.”
