There are times when the Kentucky baseball team looks like it can play with the best teams in the country. Tuesday night, when UK (16-14) shellacked Xavier 15-2 thanks to a six-run first inning and a Luke Maile grand slam, was one of them. So was this past weekend when Kentucky gave defending champion and No. 3 South Carolina all it could handle in a three-game series.But that’s also what has been keeping head coach Gary Henderson up late at nights. There’s a silver lining for Henderson that his team is close to competing, but a bottom-line factor that the Cats have lost their last two Southeastern Conference series, both by the sweep variety.”You don’t get too excited about losing, that’s for sure,” Henderson said, “but you’ve got to find some positives in there. Our starting pitching was a positive. We had some really good performances out of the bullpen as well. It wasn’t all great. There are some things we’ve got to get figured out defensively. We’re playing much better defense at home. We really didn’t have hardly any positives offensively. It was a very, very slim weekend for us. Carolina is good, yeah, and they pitched well, but we’ve got to perform better on the road.”Against South Carolina, in front of packed houses at Carolina Stadium, Kentucky nearly upset the Gamecocks on three different occasions. On Friday, junior pitcher Alex Meyer hurled an eight-inning complete game but didn’t get any run support. On Saturday, a botched pop-up and an infield single helped the Gamecocks to a walk-off win. And Sunday, 14 runners left on base, including three bases loaded situations in the seventh, eighth and ninth innings in which the Cats came up empty, was the difference between a 4-1 loss and a victory. It’s often been a case of close but not good enough. And most of the time it’s come on the road.At the familiar confines of Cliff Hagan Stadium, UK is 14-3 with a run differential of plus-56. On the road, Kentucky is just 1-7 with a minus-12 run differential. “We’re just much more confident being back home,” Henderson said. “That’s something we’ve got to handle and we’ve got to get better at. There are no excuses for it. It is what is. When we go on the road, it’s a great environment, it’s a tough environment, but that’s our conference. It’s never going to change. We’ve got to handle the road better.”The season, by expectation standards, has pretty much stuck to the script. Faced with a mass exodus of offensive losses, Kentucky was going to need its pitching staff to carry the team.For the most part it has.Meyer, despite a 3-4 record, has been rock solid. Living up to his potential first-round MLB Draft expectations, Meyer has pitched his way to a 3.10 ERA and is handcuffing hitters to a .214 average. His walks are down, his strikeouts are up and his fastballs are routinely touching above 95 miles per hour.Sophomore Jordan Cooper has struggled to build on a solid freshman campaign and has been moved out of the weekend rotation (he picked up the win Tuesday in his first midweek start of the year), but freshman lefty Corey Littrell has stepped into the weekend threesome and has a 4-1 record in six starts. Last week he was 1-0 with a 2.00 ERA.Then there is the bullpen, which has been very close to spectacular. One of the question marks heading into the season, five relievers – Trevor Gott (0.47 ERA), Walter Wijas (1.19), Mike Kaczmarek (2.16), Alex Phillips (2.51) and Nick Kennedy (2.61) – have a sub 3.00 ERA. “They’ve done great,” Henderson said. “Part of having a good bullpen is having a little bit of depth so you can match guys up and put them in a position where they can be successful. You don’t have to stretch them out very often and you don’t have to put them in matchups that aren’t conducive to them being successful. It’s the same thing we had in ’08. You can have two or three guys that are really good in the bullpen but they’re not quite as good as having five or six.”
Now it’s just about getting the offense going in clutch situations. UK has a .292 average on the season and five hitters batting above .300, but the hits haven’t always been timely.Kentucky hit just .232 overall in the Alabama sweep and .181 in the South Carolina series.Against Xavier on Tuesday, UK cranked out 15 runs on 11 hits and three home runs. In addition to Maile’s grand slam, third baseman Thomas McCarthy was 2-for-4 with five RBI.After a weekend in which none of the hits seemed to show up, on Tuesday, they seemed to be contagious.”It absolutely spreads,” Henderson said. “The confidence factor of knowing that the guy behind you just squared a ball up and you’re going to go up there and do the same thing is tremendous. When you’re really struggling, that really spreads too.”Xavier isn’t No. 3 South Carolina, but Henderson believes there is a fundamental difference in approach in how Kentucky has approached some of its games.”There’s a comfort zone when we play at home,” senior shortstop Taylor Black said. “The atmosphere on the road is a little bit different in the SEC. When we come here, we’re a little bit more in our norm.”Henderson said his players need to get over that hurdle.”It’s drastic,” Henderson said of the difference between home and away games. “That’s a 100-percent mental barrier that you’ve got to get over and get past it. We can certainly help them as much as we can, but the bottom line is they’ve got to play. They’ve got to play like their tail is on fire and a chip is on their shoulder.”There’s still a lot of time left for UK, a lot of confidence from Henderson and a lot of opportunities for the Cats. Sure, the 2-7 SEC record isn’t worth writing home about, but the positive for Kentucky is six other SEC teams are below .500, one of them being this weekend’s home opponent, 2-7 Auburn. Only the top eight teams make the SEC Tournament. As Kentucky knows all too well, if you make the league tournament, you have a good chance of making the NCAA Tournament. It basically marks the line between close and good enough.UK is trying to figure out how to step over that line. Tuesday’s 15-2 win was a good start.”I think the thing we realize is that all the teams are pretty much equal,” Black said. “We’ve played really close and we gave up some games we should’ve won. I think we need to learn that any team can learn on any day.”