Erik Bakich reacts to series loss vs FSU, Clemson running out of time

Clemson baseball is running out of time to fix its season.

After entering the year with big expectations, the Tigers are now likely staring at a path where an ACC Tournament title may be their only realistic shot at reaching the NCAA Tournament. Sunday’s 6-3 loss to Florida State sealed another conference series defeat and dropped Clemson to 30-22 overall and 9-18 in ACC play.

The offensive gap between the two teams was obvious all weekend.

Florida State finished the series with 34 hits while Clemson had only 21, forcing the Tigers to constantly try to climb back into games. Even during Saturday’s 4-3 win, Clemson was still out-hit. Across the three games, Erik Bakich’s team only held a lead for one inning total.

“They outplayed us, for sure,” Bakich said. “And just got behind early and never could quite get the offense going. So, unfortunately, just wasn’t the complementary baseball we needed.”

Clemson’s struggles at the plate showed up again in Sunday’s rubber match.

The Tigers had multiple opportunities to create offense after getting six leadoff runners aboard throughout the game, but almost nothing came from it. Clemson ended the afternoon 1-for-15 with runners on base and left seven runners stranded. A pair of double plays and several wasted at-bats kept the offense from ever building momentum.

“It’s really just stringing quality at-bats together,” Bakich said. “It always comes back to that. And so, we’ll have a quality at-bat, a guy will reach base, and then, you know, hitting (into) the two-double plays today, a couple of pop-outs. We just didn’t quite get it to where we have six, seven, eight, nine quality at-bats in a row, and leads to a big inning. You know, so it’s just really that’s what it comes down to. It’s just everybody being a connected, run-scoring offense.”

Now Clemson heads toward the postseason with almost no room left for mistakes.

The Tigers are already locked into playing on the opening day of the ACC Tournament, meaning a championship run would require five wins in six days. Because of that, Bakich admitted Clemson could consider changing its pitching plans heading into the final regular season series against Virginia Tech.