The Emporia Gold players will spend today at the pool, on the couch or maybe just in bed all day.
However they fill their time, one thing is for certain, they’re staying away from the baseball field.
The Gold finished a brutal stretch of 11 games in six days on Tuesday with 12-8 and 15-1 losses to Manhattan.
The same old problems kept the Gold from breaking out of their slump — they’ve lost nine of 11. Ten errors on the night, 11 walks issued by Emporia pitchers and a number of ill-advised throws and missing of cutoff men resulted in a couple of big innings for Manhattan.
“I keep telling them if they eliminate that one huge inning, we’re still in the game, possibly on top,” Gold coach Alex Reyes said.
The Gold offense provided what should have been enough in the opener. They took a 2-0 lead in the second inning on a Brady Marstall RBI single, followed by a Layne Shirley sacrifice that scored Brett McEvoy.
McEvoy provided nearly enough offense just by himself, punching a two-out single in the third inning that scored two runs and a two-run triple in the fifth, which he also scored on because of an error.
“Brett has been hitting the heck out of the ball lately,” Reyes said. “I’ve been moving him up in the lineup so he can hopefully drive in more runs for us.”
Chase Speer also drove in a run with a double in the sixth inning. Emporia outhit Manhattan 9-6, but the Emporia defense didn’t hold up its end of the bargain.
Everything fell apart in the top of the third inning. With Emporia leading 2-0, Manhattan started the third by drawing a walk and then Speer hit Chad Fisher to put runners at first and second.
After striking out Brady Quinn, Speer yielded an RBI single to Josh Klug. Chris Turner followed Klug, reaching on an error. Speer then got Jake Priddle to line out, which should have been the third out.
Without the error, Manhattan would have scored only one run. Instead, Speer gave up two more singles, hit another batter and walked another two. The damage: seven runs, six of which were unearned.
The Gold gave up another unearned run because of an error in the fifth inning and finished with five errors. Speer, who is the Gold’s ace and has one of their two wins in the last 11, gave up just five earned runs.
“When you score eight runs for Chase, any other day I would assume we’d won the ballgame,” Reyes said. “But once again the errors, and Chase got in a little trouble with the walks, and all those walks and errors always haunt you.”
As it has gone most of the last 11 games, the Gold once again played with Manhattan for a couple of innings in Game Two and looked to be an even match. Taylor Hickey tied the game in the second with an RBI single.
But then the Gold opened the third inning with another error and Manhattan jumped out to a 5-1 lead.
The Gold could not carry over their offensive attack from Game One, and Manhattan pitcher Chad Fisher threw a two-hitter.
The Gold defense, of course, did carry over. They committed two more costly errors during Manhattan’s seven-run sixth inning, which led to a run-rule loss.
“I think everybody just becomes lackadaisical,” McEvoy said.
In the last four games, the Gold have committed 20 errors.
“I can understand lots of baseball in the last six days, but what can you do? You’ve still got to show up and play and try to win and try to make yourself better,” Reyes said. “If you get better and lose, there’s nothing wrong with that, but whenever you have efforts that are iffy, that’s what kind of bothers me.
“Hopefully we’ll fix it. We don’t have that much time left. Hopefully we’ll fix it and get better for Zone and make a run.”
Emporia dropped to 9-20 and finishes its regular season on Thursday with another doubleheader at home against Andover.