Savage’s boys take down UCI

IRVINE — If only his UC Irvine baseball team played like UCLA’s Tuesday.

That’s how Coach Dave Serrano saw it. Look at the Bruins he said, and how they battled, fighting off pitches to stay alive down in the count in the nonconference game.

The 12th-ranked Anteaters struggled moving runners around after going up by two runs in the first inning against the No. 22 Bruins. Even when they tried to lay down sacrifice bunts, a Bruin first baseman dove head first catching the ball in midair in foul territory, stalling any threat.

The only danger UCI posed was against itself, and it might affect how it plays the rest of the way after losing, 4-2, in front of 1,046 fans at Anteater Ballpark.

“We just got awarded the highest ranking this program I guess has ever had,” said Serrano, referring to the Baseball America poll. “Do we expect, because we’re No. 12 now that teams are just going to show up and just think they’re supposed to get beat by us? We haven’t done anything yet.

“I’m disappointed as the leader of this thing. I feel like we’ve lost our edge.”

The same advantage Serrano said carried the Anteaters (31-13-1) through most of their season appears gone.

Who would’ve expected it? With only one game this week, Serrano believed they’d be ready, especially against UCLA (25-18), a Pacific-10 Conference contender coached by former UCI leader John Savage.

“My challenge to the team before the game was, ‘We have one game this week, we don’t have another game for seven days,’” Serrano said. “We had an off day already planned for [Wednesday and], I expected to have full out energy and commitment [from the players], to just get better as a team, not even win the game, and we didn’t do that.”

What Serrano witnessed was seeing his Anteaters get complacent after designated hitter Sean Madigan ripped a two-run double off the right field wall in the bottom of the first.

After that, the offense sputtered, not helping starter Dylan Axelrod (2-3). UCLA starter Garett Claypool (2-0) picked up the win in five innings.

In three consecutive innings, starting in the fifth, UCI stranded two runners on base, frustrating Serrano. The offense broke down before Axelrod was pulled after 4 2/3 innings of work.

How Serrano wanted to see his team compete, with resiliency, UCLA third baseman Jermaine Curtis showcased how it’s done. He was the main reason why Axelrod left in the fifth with two outs, and why the Bruins have gone 15-4 with him in the lineup since returning from being academically ineligible.

With two runners on, Axelrod jumped on the leadoff hitter, getting an 0-2 count with his slider. But Curtis stood his ground, fouling four consecutive pitches off before the right-handed pitcher tossed his first ball. Then came another slider, and Curtis fouled it off.

The next pitch. Curtis knew what was coming. He pulled the pitch to left field for a three-run home run, his second career homer, and just like that, UCLA led, 3-2. It was over for Axelrod.

“I was basically sitting on the slider,” said Curtis, who has 14 hits in his last 28 at-bats, “and it got out.”

The hit put the Bruins in a position to beat UCI, which came from behind in the eighth to win, 5-4, at UCLA on April 10.

Curtis said the Bruins didn’t approach this game with extra motivation, knowing they had lost to the Anteaters and that Savage coached at UCI before taking over at UCLA.

For Savage, this win meant a lot.

“It was big,” he said. “We needed to come back.”

Serrano, who’s two wins shy of 100, now feels the same about his club.

“We’re not playing fundamentally sound baseball, we’re not committing to the little things, we’ve lost our discipline,” Serrano said. “Luckily for us we have a week off to get it back going the right way.”

DAVID CARRILLO PENALOZA can be reached at (714) 966-4612 or at [email protected].Nonconference

UCLA 4,

UC Irvine 2

Score by Innings

UCLA 0 0 0 0 4 0 0 0 0 - 4 10 0

UCI 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 - 2 7 0

Claypool, Lafferty (6), Novak (6), Murphy (7) and Babineau; Axelrod, Calahan (5), Etheridge (7) and Larson. W -- Claypool, 2-0. L -- Axelrod, 2-3. Sv -- Murphy (1). 2B -- Haerther (UCLA), Madigan (UCI). HR -- Curtis (UCLA).