Cal Poly baseball won just one game in its opening series. Here are 4 takeaways
The Cal Poly baseball team kicked off its season in rocky fashion last weekend, losing three of four to University of Nevada, including a 12-6 defeat in Monday’s finale of the opening home series.
Head Coach Larry Lee said his team — which lost 11-8 on Sunday in extra innings and 2-1 on Saturday after a 4-0 opening win Friday — was just “not very good” in multiple aspects of the game over the series.
The Mustangs allowed 23 runs and left 26 runners on base in the final two games of the series, after two strong starting pitching performances by Drew Thorpe and Travis Weston in the first two games.
“There was a lot of sloppy baseball,” Lee said. “There’s a lot for the players to learn about themselves and competing at this level. I think we saw that some players are comfortable playing at a high level and some aren’t and need to continue to adjust. We saw a lot of deficiencies.”
Here are four takeaways from Cal Poly’s opening series:
Scouts on hand to watch Woo in rough outing
In Monday’s game, about 20 scouts with radar guns were on hand to watch hard-throwing Cal Poly right-hander Bryan Woo, who regularly clocks fastballs in the low to mid-90s, but Woo was in trouble from the start.
The 6-foot-2 right-hander from Alameda gave up a first inning, opposite field home run to Nevada first baseman Dillan Shrum, and the Wolf Pack built an 8-3 lead after the first four innings.
The Wolf Pack took advantage of timely hits, aggressive baserunning and two Cal Poly errors.
Woo allowed seven earned runs on eight hits in 3-2/3 innings, while striking out four.
While Woo showed impressive life on his pitches, he’ll be among the key performers on the mound for the Mustangs moving forward, Lee said.
“We’re really going to need our pitching to come through for us in our weekend games,” Lee said. “Our pitching and defense will have to be better until our hitting comes along.”
Cal Poly shortstop, the coach’s son, gets first starts
After starting the series with a 2-for-4 performance, including a single in his first pitch as a Cal Poly starter, highly rated professional prospect Brooks Lee was held out of starting roles in Saturday and Sunday due to a slight injury to his left shoulder on a slide in Friday’s game.
Lee, a San Luis Obispo High graduate and the coach’s son, was 1-for-5 with a single to right field in Monday’s game and said his shoulder wasn’t a serious issue.
“I’ll be fine,” Lee said. “I just need to give it a couple of days of rest and I should be 100%.”
Lee, who scored two runs Friday and one more on Monday, made a spectacular pickup on a one-hop line drive to the hole on Monday, gunning down the runner. He said it was “great” to take the field for his first starts as a Mustang.
That was after being held out of most of the team’s 16 games last year, a season shortened due to the pandemic, because of a leg injury, after years of observing the team as a fan. Lee has fully recovered from a surgery to repair a torn lateral collateral ligament and biceps femoris, which forms part of the hamstring muscle group.
“I know the series didn’t go as well as we wanted, but it was great to be out there,” Lee said. “As a team, I think we just need to play less scared. We need to remember it’s a game and to have fun. We need to try to be more positive.”
Cal Poly offense a work in progress
While the offense had a series-high 14 hits on Monday, including a 4-for-4 performance from senior catcher Myles Emmerson (.429), the Mustangs struggled with 12 runners left on base in the series finale.
That was after the Mustangs left 11 runners on base in Saturday’s 2-1 loss and 15 more in Sunday’s 11-8 defeat.
But the Mustangs showed offensive life, bouncing back from a 7-0 deficit in Sunday’s game to force extra innings and cause Nevada to use 11 pitchers.
Other brights spots included Cal Poly centerfielder Cole Cabrera (.333) launching the Mustangs’ first home run of the season Monday, a towering shot that carried well over the left field wall.
Cabrera, the lead-off hitter, reached base in all four games — getting aboard four times with two hits, a walk and a hit by pitch on Monday.
Third baseman Tate Samuelson (.438) tallied seven hits in the series, including a 2-for-3 performance on Friday, with two RBI.
“I feel like it was seeing the ball well and swinging the bat well,” Samuelson said. “I think as a team, we learned a lot this weekend, and as individuals performing on the field in games. It’s a hard thing to hit a baseball, and we’ll have to keep at it and keep working hard.”
In the series finale, the Mustangs got an RBI double from second baseman Taison Corio in the third inning to cut the core to 5-3, and designated hitter Matt Lopez went 2-for-4.
But finding enough run-scoring rallies was an issue, and Lee said the Mustangs will face better pitching than Nevada moving forward, meaning generating offense will be a continued need.
“You never know quite what you have until the lights come on and your guys take the field,” Lee said. “Going into the season, I thought we were a little ahead of where we are now, and it shows you don’t really know until games start. We got to see some new guys and returners and how ready they are for competition. We’ll continue to look at guys and evaluate.”
Mustangs’ top pitchers perform well
The Mustangs opened their season Friday behind stellar pitching from freshman Drew Thorpe, their expected top starter this season.
Thorpe struck out seven in 7-2/3 scoreless innings of one-hit baseball, and reliever Dylan Villalobos recorded the final four outs, with two strikeouts, while giving up the game’s only other hit to Nevada.
On Saturday, the Mustangs got another strong pitching performance from southpaw Travis Weston, one of three players who transferred to Cal Poly from Boise State, which ended its baseball program in 2020.
Weston, a redshirt freshman, struck out eight, did not allow a walk and scattered six hits over six-plus innings.
The lone run Weston allowed was unearned, as Cal Poly’s promising ninth inning rally fell short after a run-scoring single by Cabrera was followed by a successful pickoff at second with no outs. The Mustangs’ next two batters were retired on a fly ball and strikeout to end the game.
The Mustangs’ one-two starting punch of Thorpe and Weston recorded 13-2/3 innings without giving up an earned run.
But in the final two contests, the pitching and defense failed to stall the Wolf Pack offense, and the Mustangs tallied four errors Sunday, including two infield mishaps in the 10th to allow three unearned runs.
“We got good performances from our Friday and Saturday guys,” Lee said. “But we’ll need to improve in all aspects of the game as a team — pitching, defense and hitting.”
The Mustangs next face USC on the road in a three-game series Feb. 26-28, followed by Utah Valley at home March 5-7 and UCLA at Baggett Stadium on March 12-14. The Mustangs start Big West Conference play at Cal State Northridge on March 20.
To watch or listen to broadcasts, go to the links on gopoly.com/sports/baseball/schedule.
Clarification: This story was updated to clarify the specific type of leg injury Brooks Lee suffered in his first year at Cal Poly.
This story was originally published February 23, 2021 at 4:55 PM with the headline "Cal Poly baseball won just one game in its opening series. Here are 4 takeaways."
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