Tigers' postseason hopes on life support as regular season concludes

Monte Lee said his team has to have a run in the ACC Tournament next week. (Clemson athletics photo)

by David Hood - Senior Writer - Sat May 22 08:00:06 GMT-04:00 2021

Just a few weeks ago, the Clemson baseball team appeared to be a lock for the NCAA Tournament and had won a season-high seven consecutive games. Seventeen days and seven losses later, those tournament hopes are on life support.

The Tigers have lost seven out of their last nine games following Duke’s 14-8 victory at Doug Kingsmore Stadium Friday, and now sit at 24-25 overall and 16-19 in the ACC. Clemson swept Wake Forest in late April and then swept a top-five Louisville team in early May and then defeated USC Upstate to improve to 22-18 overall and 15-12 in the ACC.

The Tigers were then swept on the road at Georgia Tech, came home to defeat South Carolina, lost two of three to Florida State, and have now lost each of the first two games to Duke. The feeling heading into the weekend was that the Tigers needed to sweep Duke, or at the very least win the series, and play well in next week’s ACC Tournament in order to have a chance.

After the losses to Duke, head coach Monte Lee knows that making the NCAA Tournament field might be a longshot.

“I think we all know. We are going to have to go to the ACC Tournament and we are going to have play well in the ACC Tournament,” Lee said. “I think we need to win tomorrow, and I think we need to go into the ACC Tournament and play well and we will see where that takes us.”

Clemson has not missed the NCAA Tournament since 2008 and has earned an NCAA bid in 33 of the last 34 seasons.

With the 24-25 overall record, the Tigers are closing in on a losing season. You have to go back 57 years to 1964 to find the last time Clemson didn’t have a winning record in baseball – the Tigers went 13-13 that season. The Tigers haven’t had a losing season since 1957 (6-12). The last time the program had this few wins in a full season was in 1974 when they went 23-15 in a 38-game season under Bill Wilhelm.

Lee was asked postgame if his team lacked competitive fire and energy, and he said no.

“It has nothing to do with energy,” Lee said. “Energy does not have anything to do with executing pitches on two strike counts. If you look at the first inning when we gave up the big inning and you look at the second inning when we gave up the big inning, look at how many extra-base hits and hits we were giving up in two-strike counts. A lot of it had to do with the fact that we did not execute pitches with two-strike counts. It did not have anything to do with energy. The dugout had plenty of energy today. It is difficult to have energy when you are down as many runs as we were early.

“It wasn’t an energy issue, it was a pitch execution issue. It is frustrating. You have to execute in two-strike counts and we have to close out innings. That is the biggest thing that you see and we saw it today. We were unable early in the ballgame to close out innings, to execute pitches when we were ahead of batters and to close out innings. We scored eight runs. We certainly did enough offensively, but the first three innings killed us.”

The Tigers will attempt to avoid the sweep Saturday in Game 3. First pitch is set for 1 p.m. at Doug Kingsmore Stadium (ACCNX).