The Heights
Monday, April 4, 2011
B3
Lawrence adjusts to new role as Friday night starting pitcher By Adam Rose For The Heights
In his time at Boston College, junior outfielder Andrew Lawrence has played many different roles for the baseball team. First, former coach Mik Aoki asked him to redshirt his freshman year. While at first this disappointed the Richmond, Va., native, he said the year to get acclimated to an ACC program ended up paying dividends. “Honestly, that year was a blessing in disguise,” Lawrence says. “I was kind of upset when it first happened but it pushed me to work really hard and get to where
I am now.” During his redshirt-freshman and sophomore years, Lawrence started 33 games and 23 games, respectively, and succeeded at the plate and in the outfield. He hit .317 in 2009. Although he was holding his own at the ACC level of competition, Lawrence says the anxiety of checking the lineup card every day to see if he would start sometimes kept him from getting in a real comfort zone. “I learned to take advantage of my opportunities because I didn’t know when my starts would come. I had to be ready,” he says. Throughout his first two years playing,
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With a .378 slugging percentage, Lawrence is third on the team among players with over 20 at-bats.
Lawrence continued to get stronger in the weight room and played his role, hoping to one day become an everyday starter. With the loss of seniors and drafteligible players coming into the 2011 season, Lawrence finally got his opportunity to play every day. As one of the starting outfielders and an important cog in the lineup, Lawrence feels relaxed and ready to lead by example. “He’s got a great attitude and he can hit anywhere from two through six in our lineup” head coach Mike Gamino says. Under the new style of offense implemented by the rookie head coach this year, Lawrence has begun to show flashes of power and Gambino thinks the more open philosophy at the plate has translated into the junior outfielder getting more swings and allowing him to build a rhythm. Although happy with his role as an everyday outfielder, Lawrence has once again adopted a new role on the team as its Friday night starter. After Mike Dennhardt went down with an injury, the already arm-depleted Eagles needed someone to throw their weekend series. Gambino recalls the day in the bubble at Alumni Stadium when he first asked Lawrence to throw a bullpen. “We knew he pitched a little bit in high school and asked him to throw a session for us,” he says. “After I saw him throw two of those changeups, I knew we could make it work and now he’s starting two games a week for us.” Though his fastball won’t blow anyone away, Lawrence uses his changeup as his primary pitch and actually changes speeds with the fastball on occasion. Gambino calls this method throwing backwards. As one of the veteran guys on the team, Lawrence has enjoyed his new role and hopes to continue having success on the mound, in the field, and at the plate. “We have a lot of young guys and I’m not really the most vocal out on the field, but I try to lead by example,” he says. “If
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Andrew Lawrence fills many roles for Boston College, including outfielder, pitcher, and leader. that means my team needs me to go out and pitch a few times a week, I’ll do it.” Even though Lawrence still has another year of eligibility, this season marks most of his classmates’ swan song. He takes that to heart each time he steps on the field. “I want to win for them because they’ve done so much for this program,” he says. It takes a special kind of player to hit at a college level and also start on the mound multiple times a week. Lawrence currently leads the team in home runs and also ranks among the top half in ERA. “Statistically, it’s not going as I’d hoped but it’s been a fun season and I think it’s
gone well,” he says. “I’d rather have 40 wins and bat .100 if that’s what takes for our team to win games. It’s about the win column for us.” The Eagles currently rank in the middle of the pack in their division and have their eyes on a spot in the ACC championship series. Though his role on the team continues to change, Lawrence remains focused on the team. “He’s got a great attitude and is a really valuable guy for us,” Gambino says. For a guy who used to wonder if he would get to play on any given day, Andrew Lawrence now does a little bit of everything for the Eagles. n
Baseball notebook
Sunday curfew prevents BC, Miami from completing full game By Greg Joyce
“We have a little bit of an idea of the order, we know who we want throwing at the end of the games and close games,” he said. “We know who we want facing the top of the order, we know who we want facing the bottom of the order. So basically, the way we sort of do it is we always have two guys moving around, getting loose, and then as we get to them, we sort of make our decision with one of those two guys, depending on how the inning before that goes and how the game goes. “There’s a lot of times when guys are moving around, then something happens and we go to the next guy, and then two other guys are moving around. So it’s pretty crazy, and the boys are doing a good job handling it. I think they’re buying into it.”
Asst. Sports Editor Just when Boston College was getting momentum back on its side against Miami in the second game of yesterday’s doubleheader, ACC rules shut down any hope of a complete comeback attempt. Down 7-3 going into the fifth inning, the Eagles started to get a rally going, cutting the lead to 7-6 before the inning ended. But since it was past 4:45 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, ACC rules state that no inning can begin after that time, so the game was ruled over. The final result was a 7-6 Hurricanes win, through just five innings. “That was disappointing,” head coach Mike Gambino said of the curfew ending the game early. “Obviously we knew we were probably going to get, maybe a six-inning ballgame going in, so you kind of have that in your mind. They battled. It would have been nice to have one more inning.” The first pitch of the doubleheader came at 11:02 a.m., but the game lasted three hours and 45 minutes, delaying the start of game two until 3:16 p.m,. This forced the nightcap to last just one hour and 37 minutes. BC scored three runs in the bottom of the fifth before the rally and game came to an end on a Marc Perdios strikeout. “I thought the boys did a good job battling back and gave us a chance to win that ballgame at the end,” Gambino said. “It was unfortunate we ran into that time situation.” Pitching staff struggles Heading into the doubleheader, Gambino was planning on using Nate Bayuk to pitch the first six innings of the game before handing the ball over to the bullpen. The game plan didn’t pan out the way the
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As the shadows on Shea Field grew longer, BC mounted a furious rally against Miami. The Eagles ran out of time, though, losing 7-6 in five innings. Eagles had hoped. Bayuk lasted just 2.1 innings, allowing six runs, eight hits (including two home runs), and walked two. Seven different relievers completed the final 6.2 innings of the game and were unable to stop the bleeding. Eric Stevens, Dave Laufer, Matt Alvarez, Dane Clemens, Andrew Lawrence, Geoff Oxley, and Steve Green combined to finish the game, letting up 13 runs, 18 hits, and seven walks. Lawrence was the only BC pitcher not to allow any runs in the game.
“We were hoping he’d get us six and then go to the bullpen,” Gambino said. “Once they started getting a bunch [of runs], we started to kind of run through a bunch of guys and try to get guys in and out. That’s kind of been the motto of the bullpen all year is to get us to the next guy, and we tried to do that. But nobody could really figure them out this morning.” Though they weren’t planning on using that much of the bullpen, the Eagles are used to going through games pitching seven to eight short relievers. Since the staff is
short on healthy starters, the bullpen has been counted on various times this season to combine on nine innings. “Today was a bad day for our pitching staff, but you look at the last five, six games, they’ve been doing their jobs,” Gambino said. “They’ve been keeping [opponents] under four runs or less pretty much every game. It’s giving us a chance to win the ballgame.” As for the decision of which reliever pitches when, Gambino has it nailed down to a science.
Offensive woes While the pitching staff has been able to survive for the most part without a deep bullpen to rely on, the offense has been going through a rough patch of its own. Before the bats finally got going towards the end of yesterday’s second game, the BC hitters had been held relatively quiet over the past few games. Not including the 7-6 loss, in the last five games, BC has only been able to push eight runs across the plate. “Right now, we gotta get the bats going,” Gambino said. “We’re a lineup that doesn’t have a lot of thump, which is fine. We knew that coming in. There are guys that can swing a little bit. But if you don’t have a lot of thump and you don’t have a lot of speed, you can’t strike out a lot. “We don’t have a ton of speed. We have a couple guys that can steal bases. And we don’t have a ton of thump, but we can hit some doubles. But we gotta cut down on the strikeouts. And when we do, like in [the second] game, [we’re] a pretty good offensive club.” n
Miami outscores BC 26-10 on its way to a truncated Sunday sweep Baseball, from B1
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The Eagles finally snapped out of their offensive slump, but the pitching couldn’t stop Miami.
Anthony Melchondia, who went 2-for3 in the second game, hit a single that brought in Bourdon and Brad Zapenas, who had gotten on base with a walk. Miami put up a run in the third inning off of a two-out single by Harold Martinez. Rody Rodriguez hit a home run in the top of the fifth to give the Hurricanes a 7-3 going into the bottom half of the inning, which, due to time constraints, was slated to be the final three outs. Hamlet and Bourdon led off with back-to-back singles, and McGovern hit a sacrifice fly that scored Hamlet. With two outs, Melchionda stepped up and stroked a double that scored Bourdon, pulling the Eagles within two. Up next, pinch hitter Kyle Prohovich hit a bouncing shot that glanced off shortstop Martinez’s glove, good for a single and an RBI as Melchionda crossed the plate. The two-out rally was cut short when Marc Perdios struck out on a 2-2 count to end the game 7-6 in the Hurricanes’ favor. With the loss, Leonard drops to 3-3 on the season. “The boys did a good job of battling
back,” Gambino said. “The one positive today, in game two, in those last two innings, was that our bats finally came alive. “It started to look like what we think this lineup should be, not what it’s been recently.”
Game two of the doubleheader was restricted due to the 4:45 p.m. curfew Through the second inning of the first game of the doubleheader, with the score tied 2-2, the game seemed to be just another close ACC match-up. Sure, Miami Zeke DeVoss had cracked a leadoff home run to left field off of starting pitcher Nate Bayuk to begin the game, but freshman Matt McGovern fired back in the bottom half of the first inning with his first career homer. An inning later, the Eagles manufactured another run when Tom Bourdon singled to score Smith, who had doubled
and advanced to third on Matt Hamlet’s single. After the second frame, however, the Hurricane offense began to put more and more distance between the two scores. Miami’s Chantz Mack homered in the third inning, bringing in Rody Rodriguez and Brad Fieger and giving the Hurricanes a 6-2 lead. From then on, the Eagles never had a real chance at a comeback. “We could never really slow them down,” head coach Mike Gambino said. “We could never really stop that offense. Nobody could really figure them out.” The Hurricanes would go on to score a run in every inning with the exception of the second, and as the ninth inning mercifully drew to a close, the Hurricanes had scored 19 runs off 26 hits, both season highs for both the ball club and the ACC. Brad Fieger, Miami’s third baseman, led the charge, going 4-7 with four RBI. Bayuk drops to 3-3 with the loss, giving up six earned runs and eight hits. The team falls to 10-15, 4-7 ACC on the season, while Miami improves to 17-11, 6-3. n