‘Bows seeking more strikes from their starting pitchers

Baseball people know you don’t panic at 0-3. Especially when the losses are against a team as good as Oregon.

Yes, this could be a long season for the University of Hawaii … especially if the Rainbows had to play the Ducks every game. Fortunately they don’t — just once more, today.

So, UH coach Mike Trapasso was calm after Sunday’s 9-5 loss.

It would be ridiculous to get upset this soon. But it’s appropriate to be somewhat frustrated … maybe not about Sunday’s loss but those on Friday and Saturday.

"Give these guys credit. This game they just beat us," said Trapasso, in surveying Sunday’s damage. "But if it wasn’t for two starts where we don’t throw strikes, we’re in those (Friday and Saturday) games pretty darn good."

It’s not just walks, it’s falling behind in the count and being forced to come in with a fat pitch.

"What makes us good as a pitching staff is pretty simple," Trapasso said. "Pitch to contact with three pitches and down in the zone. We’ve seen what happens when we don’t do that."

Scott Squier and Quintin Torres-Costa didn’t throw enough strikes, and both didn’t make it out of the fifth inning.

Connor Little pitched into the seventh of his first start in nearly two years because 56 of his 83 pitches were strikes.

As a staff, the Rainbows have 11 walks and 12 strikeouts. This may not sound overly wild to you, but it is not acceptable to Trapasso, whose pitchers usually have one of the lowest walks-per-nine-innings ratios in the country.

He wants a maximum of three pitches to each hitter. It sounds easy, but it’s counterintuitive for young guys who have gotten this far because they strike everyone out, and sometimes that takes more than three pitches.

To most of them, letting the batter hit the ball is a concession.

There are lots of good reasons to pitch to contact, especially at pitcher-friendly Les Murakami Stadium. But all a young guy has to see is a game like Sunday’s where Oregon pounds out 16 hits including a home run; that can get it stuck in his mind that consistently throwing within the strike zone might not be the way to go.

Losing Jarrett Arakawa was a huge blow. In addition to getting people out, Arakawa is very good at eating innings and keeping the bullpen fresh. That’s a key to winning games later in a series.

But Trapasso refuses to use the loss of Arakawa to shoulder surgery as an excuse. "I’m not going to go into that, because that happens in baseball," he said. "It’s nothing we can control."

As for the position players, several newcomers have shown they can hit some pretty sporty pitching. Even in the first game shutout the Rainbows did not appear to be overmatched or befuddled at the plate.

Four new Rainbows are at the top of the stat sheet. Jerry Kleman, Andre Real, Adam Hurley and LJ Brewster won’t hit the combined .419 they’re at now all season. But the confidence gained by starting out so well against a quality staff could carry over as the season moves along.

Unfortunately, most of the UH pitchers don’t have similar success to build upon yet.

They won’t until they throw more strikes.