By Skye Tulio
Sports Editor
With only five home games under its belt, the baseball team will host Dayton this weekend in a three-game conference series. The Bonnies and the Flyers play today at 3 p.m. followed by 12 p.m. starts on Saturday and Sunday.
“Dayton’s a team that’s always competing for the top spot,” Head Coach Larry Sudbrook said. “They’ve won the regular season before and they’re a fully funded program with a beautiful stadium, but they’re struggling this year.”
The Flyers (9-27-1, 3-12) are not playing as well as they have in the past, according to Sudbrook.
“They run constantly,” Sudbrook said. “They’re going to steal second, they’re going to steal third and they’re going to do it with nobody out, one out, it doesn’t matter.”
Dayton has lost 12 of its last 15 games, winning its two most recent contests April 21 (4-1) and April 23 (5-4). The Flyers’ April 16 game against Cincinnati was suspended in the fifth inning.
“We have not been good this year with holding or throwing runners out,” Sudbrook said. “So our challenge against them, even though they’re struggling to pitch and to hit, is on the base paths they’re going to cause problems for us.”
Last season, the Flyers hosted the Bonnies for a three-game series and took two out of three from the Brown and White. The two teams played a Saturday doubleheader, the first game postponed from the Friday prior. The Flyers took game one (6-3) with the Bonnies claiming the victory in game two (13-6). Dayton finished out the series by taking game three, 6-2.
Sudbrook said the team’s No. 1 pitcher, redshirt senior Eddie Gray, will start one of the games this weekend after testing out his arm in St. Louis last weekend.
“He will start one of the games against Dayton,” Sudbrook said. “We held him to 60 pitches against St. Louis and we’ll probably bump that up to 75-80 pitches and try to get him back to where he can go 100 like he normally would, but right now he’s okay.”
This series will be just the second conference series the Bonnies have hosted since welcoming Butler March 30-31. The team played 28 of its first 31 games of the season on the road. It had 14 games thus far affected by inclement weather. The games were canceled, postponed or relocated.
The Brown and White have played five games at home so far and are 4-1 in said outings. These home wins represent 30 percent of the team’s 13 victories on the season.
On Tuesday, the Bonnies hosted a doubleheader against Bucknell. The Brown and White swept the Bisons at Fred Handler Park.
“Everyone was just so happy to be home,” Sudbrook said. “We haven’t played home in a month. We had played 28 road games and three home games prior and we hadn’t played home since the last weekend in March and this is almost the last weekend in April.”
The Bonnies took the first game of the doubleheader, 10-1 and earned a 3-2 win in game 2 on a pitch-hit walk-off single from junior Mark Hutmacher.
“We played pretty well in the first game but obviously that second game I do believe our dugout was down and flat for the first four or five innings. Fortunately there were some good things that happened but we had a lot of luck too.”
Radwan is currently ranked seventh in the nation for his .415 batting average. He leads the team with his average, followed by Urban with .325. Radwan also leads the team in on-base percentage at .473 and hits with 56.
Sudbrook said Radwan’s success does not come easily.
“It’s difficult to do and to do it as long as he has, I think we’ve played like 33 games, it’s pretty amazing,” Sudbrook said. “Part of it is, he’s just so even keeled. He struck out (Tuesday) and the end of the second game and if that game would have went into extra innings and he’d come up again, he would have been calm. He would have tried to take the pitcher the other way he would have given what the pitcher gave him. He doesn’t put too much pressure on himself; he’s always just taken what they give him and hit the ball where it’s pitched.”
