The No. 19 Tide baseball team lost to the Samford Bulldogs at home Tuesday, 2-4. With the loss, Alabama falls to 21-10 on the season.
The game was scoreless through the first two innings, as neither team even managed to make contact with the ball. However, in the top of the third, freshman center fielder Phillip Ervin earned three runs for the Bulldogs with a homer, giving the Bulldogs a permanent lead. In the fifth, Ervin got another RBI off a double.
However, the Tide managed to shorten Samford’s lead in the same inning, as junior Taylor Dugas hit a home run and brought in Brett Booth to make the score 4-2. Neither team scored again, and Samford finished the game on top. On the night, Bama finished with only three hits.
“I was disappointed in our effort, offensively,” head coach Mitch Gaspard said. “The top of our order has to hit. On the pitching side, I thought, overall a pretty nice job.”
One bright spot in the game was reliever Adam Windsor, who went three innings while only surrendering three hits and an unearned run.
Gaspard said the main reason his team lost was a lack of a competitive mindset.
“For this team, it’s all about competing,” Gaspard said. “And really getting after it, staying with our identity, and that doesn’t matter whether it’s Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. We have to work for our runs. We have to grind them out… And tonight we didn’t do that.”
Dugas said the team got caught looking ahead of the Bulldogs to this weekend, when Alabama travels to Nashville, Tenn., to take on the No. 1 Vanderbilt Commodores.
“We know they’re number one,” Dugas said. “But we gotta come out and play better than that, tonight. We just didn’t come out and play our game, and we have to do a better job of that.”
Still, Gaspard said his team will have to put this loss behind them and prepare to take on the No. 1 Commodores. He said the bigger thing for his team was to get back to work the next two days to try to establish an offensive rhythm.
Gaspard did note, however, that his team will have no problem with motivation going into the weekend series against Vandy.
“I think, for one, you’re playing the number one team in the nation, and that’s motivation in itself,” Gaspard said. “You’re leading the West in the SEC, so that’s motivation. And I can guarantee you that by Friday, this game will be flushed down and we’ll be ready to go.”
Brett Booth said his team wouldn’t have to worry about taking any momentum into the game, even with the loss at home to Samford.
“I don’t think you need any momentum, anything to get ready to play the number one team in the nation,” Booth said. “But you go into every game with that competitive edge, but sometimes these midweek games you kind of let your guard down… and you get the result that you see tonight.
“I don’t think this slows us down any or shuts us off for this weekend. I think everybody knows what we’re going into, and we’ll just stay with that.”
