This is where we find out what Clemson is made of. If you’ve spent your springs at Doug Kingsmore, you know these last few weeks have stung. We roared out of the gate at 15-2, visions of Omaha dancing in our heads, but suddenly the wheels have wobbled—eight losses in the last dozen games. Sure, 19-10 looks fine on paper, but 2-7 in the ACC? That’s not Clemson baseball. Not by a long shot.ot the Clemson standard.
But if you think Erik Bakich is just going to stand by and watch this team fade, you haven’t been watching Clemson baseball. After a gut-wrenching 8-6 loss to Miami—where we stared down an 8-0 hole—Bakich made it clear: this fight isn’t over.
The Ninth Inning Spark
Saturday followed a script we’ve seeSaturday felt all too familiar: fall behind big, give up a two-out grand slam, and dig a hole that looks impossible. But then came the ninth. Bryce Clavon lit a fire with his solo shot, and just like that, the Cardiac Tigers showed up. We scratched and clawed to within two, and for a heartbeat, you just knew we were about to pull off another miracle.sing. But I’m gonna tell you this right now, we lost the game today, but we took a step forward with that ninth inning and the belief system of how we were making that comeback,” Bakich said. “We’ve seen that in the past, and this losing crap is gonna stop. And it’s gonna start with a belief system. And we showed a little bit of that. Unfortunately, it was not enough. Obviously, the two-out grand slam was huge and got behind early, but there was zero doubt by anyone in that dugout that we weren’t gonna come back and win it 9-8. And we’ve done it before, and we just need to start showing it. It’s close, we’re not over the hump, but it’s close. But I’m proud of the way we fought in the ninth, even though we fell short.”
Fixing the Foundation
Let’s call it like it is: defense and slow starts have been killing us, from the sweep at Notre Dame to that stumble against Georgia Southern. But Bakich isn’t blind to it. He sees the work these guys are putting in to tighten things up with the gloves.
“It’s not good enough right now, and we need to get better, and we all know it, and we know what our deficiencies are. We’ve been working extra on defense. Our defense got a little bit better each of the last two games,” Bakich noted. “We’re just gonna put our heads down and go to work, and we’ll get there."
The scoreboard might not show it yet, but the belief in that dugout is as strong as ever. Bakich says that ninth-inning energy against Miami is exactly what this team needs to carry forward.
“There was zero doubt in the ninth inning that we were gonna win, that it was happening, it was on, the comeback was on. And it’s not even because Bryce (Bryce Clavon) led it off with a solo homer, it’s just the talk, the feeling,” Bakich said. “We need to bottle that up and be able to utilize it more often, sooner, however. But the confidence was high, it was good, it was what we needed. And it wasn’t enough, but it was something to build off of.”
The Road Ahead
The road ahead isn’t getting any easier. The Tigers are about to grind through five straight away from home, starting with Wake Forest in Charlotte on Wednesday, then heading out west to battle Stanford and Santa Clara.
“It’s just, obviously, this isn’t the start of the ACC play that anybody wanted. But it’s not how you start, as we all know, it’s how you finish. We’ll see how this plays out. We’ll see, but I can tell you right now the belief system among the team, which is all that matters, is good. Because if they didn’t believe, we’d be screwed. And there’s belief in that team.”
Bakich is spot on. At Clemson, it’s how you finish that matters. If these Tigers can capture that ninth-inning fire and take it to Charlotte, nobody will be talking about this rough patch when North Carolina rolls into town on April 10.