Clemson baseball fell 13-6 on Sunday, which meant a third straight loss to UCF at home. The Tigers were 4-0 coming into this weekend’s play, and with so much anticipation surrounding the team’s performance this season, fans were eager to see how the Tigers performed in their second home weekend series, but the Tigers faced some struggles against the Knights.

After putting up a strong fight to level the score in both the fourth and fifth innings, UCF capitalized on some errors made late in the game by Clemson to extend their lead and take all of the momentum.

Head coach Erik Bakich reflected on the overall tone of the weekend and how he believes his team needs to respond ahead of Tuesday’s match up against USC Upstate.

“Really disappointing weekend overall,” said Bakich. “Mostly in just the way we played. I mean it was one of those weekends where things statistically, if you look at the runs scored in the first six innings of the game it was pretty even, and we just let each game slip away, all three of them, late. Today, that seventh inning was the perfect example of that. They have the bases loaded, we get two huge strikeouts and then the drag bunt, the throw gets away from us, which two runs score and we’re down two and we get the next guy out, no big deal.”

“It was kind of the way things exacerbated there with the wild pitch, scores another, two outs single scores two more, and just felt like that not should have been a knockout blow,” he added. “Definitely knocked us down, but nothing that we can’t respond to. I thought that so far in this young season, we have responded quite a bit when we needed to. They scored three in the top of the first today, we scored four in the bottom of the first. It’s a good offensive team, they get up there and they take big aggressive swings. Unfortunately for us, we just didn’t have those answers in the bullpen late for each of these three games and that’s where the games were separated.”

The bullpen performance was something that hindered Clemson in each of the three losses to UCF this weekend. The loss on Sunday featured pitching from six different pitchers. Starter Jay Dill went for 3.1 innings and gave up five hits and five runs. However, it was the late game performance out of the bullpen that really widened the margin between Clemson and UCF. In the seventh inning, the Knights were able to score five runs, which is something Bakich indicated the team will have to do better ahead of some competitive games in the upcoming week, but for now, he emphasized the need to view this adversity with a positive mindset and move forward.

“Clearly, we have got to get a lot better and we will, but this will end up being a really great thing for this team to learn and grow from as the season goes on,” he said. “Getting some adversity early, we are going to find the positive in it and that’s the only thing I know how to do and that’s the only thing we’re going to do.”

Clemson baseball will play again on Tuesday, Feb. 28 at 4 p.m. at Fluor Field in Greenville, S.C. versus USC Upstate.