BOSTON — A month ago, UMass probably would have lost Wednesday’s Beanpot championship game to Harvard.
If the Crimson’s two home runs in the first two innings didn’t break the Minutemen’s spirit, the four-run fifth inning likely would have been a death knell. When adversity struck UMass in March, the players didn’t always handle it well and the negative events started a snowball effect. After winning their first three games, the Minutemen lost 15 of the next 16, including a 12-game losing streak that seemed to rattle the confidence in the clubhouse.
However, it was a far different UMass team that took the field Wednesday at Fenway Park against the Crimson. It was a squad feeling confident in itself after winning six of its previous nine games, many of which required the Minutemen to battle through the momentum shifts of the game. UMass had a response each time Harvard added to its lead before eventually ending the game on a walk-off sacrifice fly for a 10-9 win over the Crimson.
“They learned at some point in the middle of the year here that we’re just going to keep going, we’re just going to keep the gas on,” second-year coach Matt Reynolds said. “When bad things happen to us, we’re not going to let the air come out of the tires, we’re just going to keep pressing on and expect things like this are going to happen at the end. If we don’t have that faith and trust in each other, then they probably won’t happen to us.
“That was the story earlier in the year, we were waiting for bad things to compound and we figured out if we put it behind us and keep moving forward, it gives us a chance to do something special.”
Ironically enough, it was the first round of the Beanpot that seemed to start the momentum rolling in a positive direction for UMass. The Minutemen’s 6-2 victory over Boston College on April 2 was the first time they won back-to-back games since the start of the season and the pressure of the losing streak seemed to vanish off their shoulders.
UMass showed a lot of resiliency against the Eagles that day, scoring three runs in the fifth inning after Boston College tied the game. Meanwhile, the pitching staff combined to shut down the Eagles, limiting them to just two hits over the final five innings as the Minutemen punched their first ticket to the Beanpot title game in four years.
“I felt like we were playing some good baseball, we just couldn’t put the big hits together and pitch at the same time,” sophomore first baseman Anthony Videtto said. “That was a big game for us, we pitched well, we hit well and just effort wise, we really wanted to win that game and that just sparked us and turned our season around, which was good for us.”
Although the win over Boston College looked like the turning point, Reynolds pointed to the Minutemen’s first series of conference play as when he started to notice a shift in the mindset of his team. The losing streak was at six when UMass traveled down to preseason favorite VCU for a three-game set to open Atlantic 10 action. Despite getting swept to extend the slump to nine games, Reynolds said he didn’t feel like UMass lost those contests because it played poorly – the reason he gave for most of the defeats leading up to those games.
Senior Logan Greene, the pinch-hit hero of Wednesday’s win, said the players gained a lot of confidence from those matchups with the Rams because it showed them they could compete with the best teams the Atlantic 10 had to offer.
“We played them hard for three games and that was excellent to see,” Greene said. “We didn’t scrape out a win that weekend, but it showed we were a good ballclub and we can hang with the best of them.”
That has certainly proven to be the case as the Minutemen head to Maine this weekend for four games with the Black Bears in Orono. After the series against Maine, UMass has just four conference series left as it makes a push to be one of the seven teams that qualify for the Atlantic 10 tournament May 22-25 in Bronx, New York. With a 5-7 record in the conference, UMass is tied on wins for that final spot in the postseason, which it hasn’t reached since 2012.
Although there are a lot of games to play over the final month of the season, wins like the one on Wednesday set a tone for the Minutemen in these critical matchups. Reynolds said seeing that hard work and determination pay off in comeback wins only re-enforces the confidence that it can be replicated later in the season in a similar situation.
“You can say ‘keep the gas on them, we can come back,’ you can say all those things, but you have to see it every once in a while to believe it,” Reynolds said. “You’ve got to see it every once in a while come to fruition to believe that we can come back and no matter how many runs we’re down we can keep going and be in the ball game.”