Injuries, poor hitting tormented Rainbows

The 2013 University of Hawaii baseball season can be summed up by one game back in February.

Four hours and 48 minutes after the first pitch to start the second series of the year, the Rainbows failed to bring home a runner in scoring position for the 20th straight time in a 1-0 loss to Rice that lasted 17 innings.

The 0-for-20 with men in scoring position was not an aberration. It was the beginning of a season marred by offensively futility and a pitching staff decimated by injuries.

The end result was a 16-35 record, matching the fewest win total of any Rainbow team dating back to 1974, when the Rainbows only played 17 games.

UH managed a seventh-place finish in its first season in the Big West Conference, going 11-16.

Still, it was the first time the ‘Bows failed to reach 30 wins since 2008 and just the second losing season since 2002, head coach Mike Trapasso’s first year.

"We talked throughout the year how our guys had a hard time recovering from (the Rice game)," Trapasso said. "That’s something where kids will struggle with confidence and that was a thing for us this year."

The losses mounted as UH started 0-10 and was just 5-19 out of conference against a schedule ranked the toughest in the country heading into the season.

The Rainbows were dealt a blow weeks before the season started when pitcher Jarrett Arakawa had season-ending shoulder surgery.

The injuries continued to pile up once the season started. Junior left-hander Andrew Jones, the highly touted recruit from Australia who played junior college ball in Arizona, came out on fire against Oregon.

He struck out four and recorded eight straight outs before giving up an infield hit. He wouldn’t throw another pitch, leaving with an elbow injury. He had Tommy John surgery a month later.

Fellow lefty Quintin Torres-Costa, the reigning Hawaii high school player of the year, pitched twice before injuring his elbow in batting practice on UH’s first road trip.

He tried to rehab the injury but became the second UH pitcher lost to Tommy John surgery earlier this month. He won’t pitch in 2014.

The final blow came when Scott Squier was suspended for the final four weeks after breaking a team rule.

"It was the strangest season that I’ve ever been a part of," Trapasso said. "By the time you reach the third week you’ve lost three of your top four guys and from that point on, looking at the No. 1 schedule in the country the rest of the way, you’re just grabbing on that ledge and hanging on and doing whatever you can to survive."

Trapasso will survive into the final year of his current contract but will do so without longtime pitching coach Chad Konishi, who had been with Trapasso from the start.

Konishi will not return after 12 years at UH and the search is under way to find a full-time hitting coach. Both UH assistants will focus on an offense that has gotten worse each year since Hawaii’s last regional appearance in 2010.

Since then, UH has seen its team batting average plummet at least 19 points each year.

This season, it fell to a league-worst .239 and UH finished in the bottom 10 of 296 teams ranked in scoring, home runs and stolen bases.

Third baseman Pi‘ikea Kitamura is the only significant offensive player lost to graduation and freshman Andre Real is transferring to a junior college next year.

Other than those two, UH returns every other position player who had more than 26 at-bats in addition to a recruiting class that could rank as the best under Trapasso depending on the results of next week’s MLB Draft.

The model Trapasso has for the program to get back to a regional is simple: survive a tough nonconference schedule at .500 or better and finish in the top half of the Big West.

UC Santa Barbara proved that this season when it earned an at-large berth to the NCAA tournament with a 34-23 overall record an RPI of No. 55.

"I think that was huge," Trapasso said. "It was good for the Big West, West Coast baseball, and ultimately for UH baseball because we’re going to be able to say, ‘Hey, that’s the formula we have used in the past and it’s the formula that we can continue to use.’"