When one win turns into four wins, you smile.
When four wins turn into 10, you laugh.
When 10 wins turn into 16, you might even cheer.
When 16 turns into 22, though, and the pressure of even just one loss starts to take hold, those smiles, laughs and cheers evaporate.
For the UCLA baseball team, there’s reason to grin once more.
The Bruins ascended to the top of the Baseball America and Rivals.com rankings on Monday after taking two-of-three at No. 18 Oregon State, the team’s first time at No. 1 during the season since March 1997.
Despite three losses in six games after 22 to start the season, the Bruins are taking a healthier approach into tonight’s tilt at UC Riverside.
“The streak started to affect the players and how we played, how we even approached every game,” UCLA head coach John Savage said. “It seemed like the last couple weeks, we had not played how we’d been playing. The 22 games…we needed to get back to basics and fundamentals. Being aggressive, playing a pitch at a time.”
With Gerrit Cole, Trevor Bauer, Rob Rasmussen and Garret Claypool on the mound, those pitches are often strikes. UCLA’s starters are a combined 20-2 in 28 starts, having surrendered only 47 runs in 183 innings (a 2.56 earned run average) while striking out 243.
The Bruins’ pitching prowess extends into the bullpen, though, with closer Dan Klein leading the team with six saves and a 0.40 ERA in 17 appearances.
“They’ve really taken hold of their roles,” Savage said. “The starters, the long-relievers, the set-up guys, certainly Dan. He came to me in the offseason and said, ‘I want to be the closer, I want to have the ball at the end of the game.’ Whenever you have roles and you have guys performing well, things seem to go smoothly.”
UCLA’s bats, meanwhile, have cooled off a bit since the torrid start.
The Bruins are third in the Pac-10 with a .331 team batting average, and second in the conference with 26 home runs. The team has scored just six runs in its three losses, though.
“It is nice to always come out and put up a lot of runs, but baseball is not like that,” said sophomore second baseman Tyler Rahmatulla, who is second on the team in batting at .410 and leads with 26 RBIs. “There are going to be some close games. Last year, we weren’t very successful in those one-run games. We had to become mentally tough and grind those out.”
This season, they have, winning all five of their one-run games.
For Savage, though, a two-run win has been the team’s best.
A day after losing its first game of the season, an 8-4 loss to Stanford on April 2, the Bruins took out the Cardinal, 7-5. Though UCLA would lose the next two, to Cal State Fullerton and the series-opener at Oregon State, Savage looks at the bounce-back win as the day the Bruins refocused on the season and not the streak.
“The result was a little ahead of the process,” Savage said. “We needed to back off that. The Stanford loss came at a good time, and we ended up having our game of the year, bouncing back to win the third game of the series. The streak was great, players responded, but at the same time, baseball is a game of ups and downs.”
And for now, UCLA is up.
All the way at the top.