By Staff Writer Thomas Griffin.

The 2019 Corsair Men’s Baseball team started its season with four wins, five losses, for a total nine games of inconsistency.

The UMassD team’s week of play began with a 9-6 shutdown of the fourteenth-ranked Keystone.

Despite allowing five runs in the first inning, Corsair pitcher Max Penton stopped opposing batters in their tracks, allowing only one more run through the last eight innings.

A few well-placed doubles and a dinger from Mike Knell was enough to put the Corsairs up by three and comfortably leading en route to an upset against a ranked opponent.

A statement win of this scale would be enough to put UMassD on the map, as a team that hasn’t yet quite breached the top 25 but is ready to make noise at any game and any moment.

A week later, the team made the wrong type of noise against Clarkson.

The final score of Friday’s game against Clarkson stood at thirteen to nothing in Clarkson’s favor.

In a game with no homers, no triples, and barely even a few doubles (both of which were courtesy of a Clarkson batter), UMassD suffered a slow, painful defeat to RBI base hits. Of the four hits the Corsairs squeaked out over nine innings, none of them brought in a run.
This team seems poised to punch above their weight and run away with big wins, yet at the same time, can’t seem to escape the curse of suffering from blowout losses when they least expect it.

Take, for example, another painful loss at the hands of Amherst College earlier in the week.

The Corsairs were down 6-0 by the end of the second inning.

As if the game didn’t already seemed out of reach, the Mammoths fired off a horrific eight runs in the bottom of the fifth inning alone. Trading pokes for punches, the Corsairs limped away from Amherst at a score of 18-5.

As a whole, this team’s standard of play is a mystery.

They seem to have very little consistency from game to game, with equal chances to rout teams and suffer blowouts themselves.

While their lockdown bullpen has already proven its game-saving worth this season, it’s not consistent enough to save the squad from opposing teams running up the score.

They’re not a categorically “bad” team by any means, but they could be a few in-game errors away from seeing their season run away from them.