The home of the Birmingham Barons hosted an in-state, baseball matchup between UAB and Alabama Tuesday night. Alabama had just come off of a big series win against No. 7 LSU last weekend, but it could not keep the momentum rolling. The Crimson Tide was shutout by the Blazers, 8-0. Alabama has now dropped to a 13-7 record.

“These Tuesdays are very important,” Alabama coach Mitch Gaspard said. “I just told the team, ‘These games are very, very important. We have to come out and play with good energy and play well. There are only 56 of these and you have to perform at a high level, and we didn’t do that tonight.’”

UAB out hit Alabama, 12-4. UAB scored four early runs in the second inning and never looked back. Mike Oczypok, who took his first season loss in his last start at Southern Miss, struggled again. He had four earned runs on just 2.2 innings pitched.

“Really on our end, it’s really the second Tuesday in a row that I thought was a pretty poor performance on our side,” Gaspard said. “Came out flat and they jumped on us in a hurry and we didn’t show a lot of fight tonight unlike what we did this [last] weekend, so it was a disappointing night [Tuesday].”

Offensively, Alabama could not muster anything. The Blazers’ defense played well and corralled just about anything that was hit in play. Their left fielder, Riley McCown, made a couple of diving snags to keep Alabama scoreless.

“As a team we played really clean tonight,” McCown said. “We just continued to put it on, put it on, one run here and one run there and just didn’t let up.”

Alabama will face its first SEC matchup this weekend as Tennessee comes to Tuscaloosa.

“We just have to keep working. We have to press these guys and go on,” Gaspard. “This team is very capable. Just have to stay with it. It’s a disappointing night, but this team will bounce back. They’ll be ready to go this weekend.”