By John Sleeper
Herald Writer
SEATTLE – The most important thing the Washington Huskies did – or didn’t do, rather – was panic.
They had reason to.
It was the late afternoon of April 7, and the Huskies had kicked away a game at Missouri, a 12-11 disaster in which they had booted leads of 6-0 and 9-6. Two errors in the ninth inning (the Huskies committed four in the game) led to two Missouri runs and ended the contest.
It was Washington’s seventh straight loss and left the Huskies 12-15-1.
“We were just playing so poorly, it couldn’t get any worse,” said UW coach Ken Knutson, in his 10th year. “It was as bad a baseball as I’ve seen since I’ve been here.”
Never one for marathon mass meetings on the amateur psychologist’s couch, Knutson addressed the problem without making it as important as governmental warnings of terrorist threats.
Since then, the Huskies have won 16 of 25 games and are in second place in the Pacific-10 Conference, a game behind front-runner USC and tied with Stanford. Pitching, led by all-conference candidate Shawn Kohn, has given up a respectable 55 walks in 225 innings (compared to 95 for UW opponents in 218 2/3 innings). The defense has committed just 22 errors (to opponents’ 27).
And now, coming into its last three-game series of the regular season, against Arizona, Washington is a strong candidate for the postseason.
The Pac-10 regular-season champion earns an automatic berth to regionals. USC, having beaten Washington in two of three games at Los Angeles two weeks ago, holds a tiebreaking advantage over the Huskies, which means Washington needs help from UCLA this weekend to vault past the Trojans.
However, the Huskies beat Stanford in two of three games a month ago and would win the title should Washington and the Cardinal finish in a first-place tie and USC falters.
“There’s no room for error,” Knutson said. “You could walk in this weekend in first place and walk out fourth. All the matchups are critical. It’s going to be awesome.”
It’s a long way from early April, the season’s low point.
“We’re coming together now,” said Tyler Davidson, a junior from Meadowdale High School. “We’re seeing what we can do and just coming out and doing it. It got really bad. We were losing games we should have been winning. It seemed like nothing was going our way. Nothing we tried worked. It compounded and came down on us really hard. We were just sick of losing.”
Expectations coming into the season were high for this team, despite two straight eighth-place finishes in the conference. Washington began 2002 returning starters at virtually every position, five of whom began the year as third-year starters.
Still, a slump can stick like flypaper. And baseball, more than any sport, has its unexplainables.
“I don’t think it was lack of effort or concentration,” Knutson said. “The two things have been that they’ve tried too hard and sometimes they didn’t show a lot of confidence because they haven’t been as successful as I’ve liked them to be or they want to be.”
Knutson knew the Huskies were better than their record last year. Injuries forced him to constantly juggle the pitching staff. Kohn (6-2, 2.57 ERA, .204 opponents’ batting average) was the lone constant, and he has continued his consistency this year, at 10-4, with seven complete games and a 3.17 ERA.
In fact, since the Missouri debacle, Husky pitching has been very solid. In that time, starters Kohn, Sean White and Clay Johnson are a combined 9-3, with 64 strikeouts and 28 walks.
“The games we’re winning 6-3, we were losing 8-6,” Knutson said. “Now, we’re going in and figuring we’re going to keep them to two to four runs.”
The offense has been sparked by two freshmen, Aaron Hathaway and Kyle Larsen.
In the last 25 games, Hathaway is hitting .368, with four homers and 16 RBI. Larsen has hit .360, with two homers, four doubles and 13 RBI.
“They’ve got experience now,” Knutson said. “They’re not freshmen anymore. They’ve been around a little bit. They’re talented kids. You need experience, really, to go through slumps and to see good pitching consistently.”
Also, Davidson has resumed hitting with power. In the last 25 games, Davidson has hit seven homers, knocked in 24 runs and is hitting .358.
“I was struggling a lot,” Davidson said. “I was chasing a bunch of bad pitches and trying to hurry up everything. It got me out of sync.”
He’s back now, much like the rest of the team.
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