With little more than a month left in the regular season, the BGSU baseball team is coming into their most important stretch of the year.
“This is probably one of those weeks where we’ll find out if we’re contenders or pretenders,” coach Danny Schmitz said.
Predicted to finish third in the Mid American Conference East Division, the Falcons hold their destiny in their own hands with 12 of their last 16 games against MAC opponents.
After starting the year 11-11, the Falcons are 9-4 so far this April and moved one step closer to meeting a team goal of a regular season MAC championship when they swept Toledo last weekend.
BG (8-4) is now tied for first in the East and is just one game behind MAC leaders Central Michigan (9-3).
Helping matters is the fact that the Falcons will face both Kent State (8-4) and Miami (6-6) at home this year. BG has been outstanding at Warren Steller Field, improving to 11-1 after a close win over Cleveland State Wednesday.
“It’s nice that we have Miami and Kent at home, we’ve been playing well at home,” third baseman Tyler Wasserman said.
Leading the charge for the Falcons’ offense has been senior second baseman Eric Lawson. Lawson leads or is tied for the lead in 11 offensive categories including batting average (.380), slugging percentage (.512), on base percentage (.497), walks (22), runs (28) and total bases (62).
His .497 on base percentage leads the MAC and he is second in both batting average and walks.
“Mainly the thing has been that I’m starting to see a lot more good pitches,” he said. “The rest of the line-up has come around and when they’re hitting well it lets me see more good pitches.”
Lawson knew a lot would be riding on the performances of the upperclassmen on the team.
“I knew I was going to have to have a good year because we are so young,” he said. “I still wish I would have done a couple things better but as long as we’re winning I’m happy,” he said.
Another senior having a great year at the plate is Wasserman. He is second on the team in batting average (.371) and is riding a seven game hitting streak coming into this weekend.
If Wasserman can hit safely in each game against Akron he will tie the longest streak of his career at 10 games. The longest of the year for BG was a nine game jaunt by Lawson earlier this month that featured eight multi-hit games and ended against Dayton.
Match-up vs. akron Record: BG (20-15, 8-4 MAC) Akron (7-25, 2-10 MAC) Series: BG leads 22-19 Team AVG: BG .289, Akron .279 Team ERA: BG 4.49, Akron 7.13
