Big innings key to victory for Rams in earlygoing
VCU Baseball continued its dominant start to the season, shutting out East Carolina University in a 3-0 win at the Diamond and raising its record to 7-1, good for first in the Atlantic 10 standings.
Alex Greer
Contributing Writer
VCU Baseball continued its dominant start to the season, shutting out East Carolina University in a 3-0 win at the Diamond and raising its record to 7-1, good for first in the Atlantic 10 standings.
Freshman designated hitter Logan Farrar record two RBIs and junior Daniel Concepcion earned his second win, pitching six-and-one-third scoreless innings, which lowered his season earned run average to a 1.19.
Senior Logan Kanuik recorded his first save of the season, pitching the final two-and-two-thirds innings while striking out three to add to his conference-leading 12th strikeout. James Bunn recorded his 12th hit of the season to hold his lead in the A-10.
“East Carolina is a good team,” head coach Shawn Stiffler told VCU Athletics. “But we were able adjust and get a win. (Concepcion) really gave us a chance to win and obviously Logan Kanuik was just as good on the back end.”
In this game, VCU continued its offensive trend of banking on the big inning to put them ahead of their opponents. In seven of eight games this season the team has scored at least half of their runs for the game in a single inning. In those innings VCU is batting .500 while for the season they are batting .288. To further add to the disparity, in those other innings VCU has only batted .130 marking a 37 percent decrease in batting performance.
Those innings are responsible for 54 percent of the team’s total offense, garnering 28 of their 52 runs scored, while more than covering the 19 total runs that VCU has outscored opponents by this season.
In those innings, VCU has shown its ability to take advantage of their opponents’ defensive miscues, with almost half of all errors committed by opposing teams occurring in those seven innings.
The Rams have shown more discipline at the plate in those innings, drawing eight walks against only four strikeouts giving them a ratio of two walks to every strikeout while posting a ratio of under one in all other innings.
There does not appear to be a correlation between innings and the scoring or whether the Rams are facing starting or relief pitchers.
The big innings for VCU have continued to benefit the team thanks to the pitching staff’s ability to avoid the big inning themselves, surrendering two or more runs in only 11 of 73 innings pitched.
