In a bipolar game with sporadic rain, Sac State only reached home once versus Cal Berkeley on Thursday.
Sac State couldn’t get any juice going, they failed to retire batters and struggled to put the ball in play, leaving the diamond with five total hits in the game.
The Hornets’ lone run, a homer to right field in the third from junior outfielder Andrea Lira, who has 28 hits and six home runs on the season.
Cal caught fire early in the first inning with four runs putting Sac State in a hole they couldn’t recover from, resulting in an 11-1, 5-inning loss against a Cal team with only four losses on the year.
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Senior outfielder Gwen Ludwig said the team needed to lock in and be better at this point in the season.
“In order for a team to get better this season, just gonna work on communicating a little bit better, and then just practicing leadership on the field, ” Ludwig said. “We need to strengthen both of those things to mesh a lot better to get ready for the rest of the season.”
Sac State head coach Lori Perez said the team didn’t step up their game enough against a good team.
“Those kinds of things are gonna happen, good teams are gonna force you to play better,” Perez said. “We didn’t play a good game today, so our goal is to not let that happen again.”
Lira said the team needs to get back to working on the small details of the game to succeed.
“Just getting back to working down the basics, just as simple as catching throws and getting into hitting mechanics and then being able to work as a team,” Lira said. “It’s just a matter of practicing and being able to become a group.”
Sac State was due to play at Oregon State over the weekend in a three game series but rainy weather conditions forced the teams to cancel the games.
Perez said the plan is to regroup with more time to practice as they look forward to their upcoming games.
“With the cancellations of the games this just allows us to get to work on some things that we got to improve upon, and allows us to get healthy,” Perez said. “We got a few players out that are injured. It’s a good kind of time to sort of get a refresher and get back to playing ball on Tuesday.”
Sac State now sits at 12-12 on the season and looks to regroup versus Columbia at home on Tuesday at 3 p.m.
