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After a historically hot start to the season the Long Beach State Dirtbags are on a cold streak after dropping a 3-0 contest to Dartmouth Wednesday night on Bohl Diamond at Blair Field.
LBSU (10-4-1) has lost three of its last four games and struggled to figure out Big Green starting pitcher Marco Dumsky as the righty struck out 11 batters. Meanwhile, the Dirtbags were 4-for-30 at the plate.
“Our offense is definitely scuffling,” Dirtbags coach Bryan Peters said. “Every mistake seems to be magnified. When you’re up and you make a mistake it feels like we’re going to be okay. But right now we’re hanging on every mistake.”
Dartmouth jumped out to a 1-0 lead with an unearned run in the first inning against LBSU starter Josh Donegan, who was a bit rushed at the start of the contest until he settled down to pitch six innings while scattering five hits and striking out three batters.
“Donegan probably wasn’t as sharp as he can be,” Peters said. “I thought we pitched overall good enough to win the game, but you can’t win when you don’t score.”
After six scoreless frames following the first inning, Dartmouth added two runs including a home run by Kolton Freeman.
Peters is hoping the team will regroup ahead of their road series at UC Santa Barbara to open Big West Conference play this weekend. He said the team needs to get back to what they were doing a couple weeks ago and not hyper-fixate on this cold stretch at the plate.
“The boys have the greatest piece of the culture,” Peters said. “They make the chemistry up. So if you lose some games, you can’t lose the locker room. So, I’m hoping our culture and our chemistry is strong enough to be able to get it back amongst themselves and we just need to get back to our positivity and a little bit of confidence, even when it’s hard when you’re not having success.”
The first game at UCSB is Friday at 4:35 p.m.
