Lee, Clemson Looking for Answers After Early Season Struggles
Many thought this would be the season that Clemson started to re-establish itself as a premier college baseball program.
The Tigers were loaded with quality arms and despite a lot of youth, appeared to have enough bats in the lineup to win a lot of games.
Ten games into the season, things aren't going exactly as planned for Monte Lee and this Clemson team. After sweeping Cincinnati at home to open the season, the Tigers have lost three straight games, five of their past seven and are currently sitting at just 5-5 and 1-2 in ACC play.
In all but one of their losses, Clemson has failed to score more than two runs and has struggled to hit the ball with runners on base, especially in scoring chances.
“Bottom line is we just got to do a better job of being able to hit with runners in scoring position,” Lee said Sunday after the Tigers lost a weekend series to Notre Dame.
Injuries, youth and inexperience have all seemed to play a part in the team's slow start. Clemson has just seven upperclassmen on the roster currently, while 27 players are listed as freshmen, with 13 of those being true freshmen.
Veterans Adam Hackenberg, Sam Hall and Keyshawn Askew are all would-be regulars in the lineup that has yet to play due to injuries. Kier Meredith missed the first two weekends with an injury as well.
In part, due to those injuries, the Tigers have had up to four true freshmen in the starting lineup at times. Sometimes five. Max Wagner, Blake Wright, Alex Urban, Regan Reid and Caden Grice have all seen a significant amount of time on the field.
While Grice has gotten off to a hot start, hitting .385 and leading the team with four home runs, those other four freshmen are hitting a combined .161. The lack of success seems to be taking a toll on the confidence of some of them, and it is starting to show in the body language at times.
"We're working on everything that I can think of to try to get our guys in the right frame of mind and fundamentally sound," Lee said. "It's just nothing's working right now. Our kids are fighting our kids are feeling it. They know that things haven't gone well for us and they're struggling."
Maybe the biggest issue the Tigers have faced so far is their inability to get that timely hit. In their last three losses, Clemson has left a total of 26 runners on base. On the season, they are hitting just .232 with runners in scoring position and average more than nine strikeouts per game. They have also hit into seven double plays.
Even the pitching has been inconsistent at times after coming into the season with what Lee called his deepest and most talented staff to date. Starters Davis Sharpe and Ty Olenchuk are both off to solid starts, but the team still needs more consistency out of the Sunday and midweek starters.
"We can't make excuses, we got to go to work tomorrow," Lee said Tuesday. "We got to try to get our club better in all areas because we're much better than this. We've got a better team than this."
The 10 games played is still a fairly small sample size. With so much youth, the Tigers really could have benefitted from the traditional non-conference schedule they would play in typical seasons to get any kinks in the lineup worked out.
The schedule will not get any easier from here either. After playing eight of their first ten games at home, Clemson will now hit the road for a three-game weekend series against North Carolina, which fell out of the d1baseball.com top-25 this week.
Despite the early struggles, Lee is still confident that his team is better than what they have shown so far. The head coach is hopeful that a weekend away could actually help the team get the season back on track.
"I'll still think we've got a good team and we're going to be OK," Lee said. "I think it could be a good thing for us to go on the road and, you know, just go play baseball.