Maryland baseball has won two out of three games in each Big Ten series thus far in the exact same fashion: winning on Friday and Saturday, before falling on Sunday.
The Terps are entering a crucial portion of their season with five Big Ten series left, starting with a three-game bout against Purdue this weekend. They enter the Purdue series with a 6-3 conference record, tied with Michigan State for fourth-best in the Big Ten.
Maryland will need improvement out of its Sunday pitching to climb in the conference standings.
Kyle McCoy, the Sunday starter, has seen his production take a dip since the beginning of the conference slate. McCoy’s earned run average reduced to a season-low 2.81 after an eight-inning shutout performance against UCF just before Big Ten play. But the freshman has had a rocky start to his first taste of Big Ten competition.
McCoy was drilled in the face by a line drive in his outing against Rutgers two weeks ago and was forced to come out of the game. Even though he returned this past weekend against Ohio State, he went just 3.1 innings and allowed six earned runs.
Coach Rob Vaughn will need more consistency out of his third starter down the stretch if he wants a shot at making a deep NCAA Tournament run.
Beyond McCoy, the bullpen deserves as much of the Sunday blame as the starter, often struggling to hold leads or keep close games within reach. Of the 11 earned runs per game in the last three Sundays, an average of six come from the bullpen.
“The last three consecutive Sundays, we had a six-run inning, a nine-run inning and another [eight], or something crazy like that,” Vaughn said. “Not giving up two or three [runs], but having a severely crooked number. And in every single one of those you can point to one thing in the middle of that inning that could’ve minimized it.”
Sunday games in college baseball are often more high scoring than the previous two of a weekend series, as bullpens get thinned out by the series finale. Vaughn had used his “four-headed monster” of Nigel Belgrave, Tommy Kane, Kenny Lippman and David Falco Jr. in the Terps’ most recent series against the Buckeyes on Friday and Saturday, leaving none in peak condition to make an appearance on Sunday.
Maryland’s skipper instead threw out Andrew Johnson, Matt Orlando and Logan Ott, who combined to allow seven earned runs in 4.2 innings. A lack of depth in the backend of the Terps’ bullpen has left the coach with limited answers for who to trust on Sundays.
Luckily for Vaughn, his top two arms — Jason Savacool and Nick Dean — have provided about as much as the coach could have hoped for up to this point in conference play. The duo has consistently gone deep into outings and put minimal strain on a struggling bullpen that has just one arm with a sub-five earned run average among relievers with at least three innings thrown.
Savacool has a team-leading 3.13 ERA and has allowed three runs or less in all but two of his starts this season.
Dean has been outstanding since the start of Big Ten play after struggling for the first month-plus of the season, hurling 16.1 innings in three conference starts to the tune of a 1.68 ERA.
Savacool and Dean’s recent flourishment have paved the way for Maryland’s Friday and Saturday success, while McCoy’s stumbles have left Vaughn with uncertainties on Sundays.
The irony of the Terps’ Sunday struggles through the first three weekends of conference play is that they’ve averaged more runs per game (8.0) than on Saturdays and Sundays (6.2). But the pitching staff has allowed an astounding 13 runs per game on the last day of each series, compared to just 4.5 on the first two days.
Maryland’s wins and losses come and go just like the consistency of its pitching. No matter how many runs Vaughn’s group scores on a given day — and they have scored plenty — wins will only come as the starters work deep into games and the bullpen holds the fort.
The past three weekends have been the perfect encapsulation of that.
“We just haven’t played 27 good innings of baseball,” Vaughn said.
