Baseball loses, Atkinson falls short on Friday

But Brooks Dyroff wins!

I feel badly for having to include Cam Atkinson in the title of this article, but unfortunately, he did have something in common with our baseball team today (I’ll deal with them in a moment). He did not win the Hobey Baker Award tonight — Andy Miele of Miami did — but the fact that he made the “Hobey Hat Trick” is still a great honor. We Eagles fans know that we had one of the best players in the country on our team, and even though he lost out on the prize tonight, he is no loser. He’s still a tremendous player who did a lot of good for this program. It’s disappointing, but kind of expected and nothing to lose any sleep over.

What the baseball team did, however, is more damaging. The Eagles fell to Duke in the first game of three in Durham by a 10-6 score on Friday evening. Blue Devils starter Dillon Haviland went 5.2 IP for the win while his offense pounded out 16 hits in support of him. Boston College, ever in love with their spring training-esque our-starter-goes-two-innings philosophy, sent seven pitchers to the mound, who gave up a total of nine earned runs.

This loss puts the Eagles down to 11-16 (4-8) and the resume is becoming legitimately ugly. Any hope of this team making the NCAA Tournament was gone long ago, but now we’re seeing signs that this isn’t even going to be a decent season from our boys.

I have said before that this series will be very telling for BC. Duke is an average team, and one of the few in this top-heavy conference that the Eagles might have a chance of beating. They have played good teams like UNC and Georgia Tech, which has hurt their ACC record (1-5 against those two), but they haven’t done anything wowing as of yet, either. If BC can’t get anything done in this set, it’s conceivable that things will get very ugly heading into May. The Eagles have series against Georgia Tech and Virginia on the schedule — I hate to say it, but you can pencil in 4 to 6 losses right there. Clemson and NC State are varying shades of decent, while Wake (like in their revenue sports this year) is awful. The bottom line is that the schedule isn’t going to get any easier, and BC is already going belly up.

I don’t think I’m wrong in assuming that most Eagles fans can’t wait for this sports year to be over.