Colonels baseball team faces busy week coming off series sweep

Coming off a three-game season-opening sweep against visiting Sacred Heart, Nicholls finds itself with a busy week starting on Tuesday.

The Colonels (3-0) are scheduled to take on Tulane at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday in New Orleans in their first road game of the season. Nicholls returns home on Wednesday to host Dillard at 6 p.m.

Nicholls follows that up with a three-game series against visiting Eastern Illinois. The Colonels are slated to take on the Panthers at 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with the finale set for 1 p.m. Sunday.

“I think playing all these games early is really important for people to understand,” Nicholls coach Mike Silva said. “I do that on purpose because it forces us to use different guys, not just the same cast of characters and kind of figure out our team. As a coach, just like players are getting going, we’re trying to figure out where our guys fit best.”

Nicholls is coming off a sweep of Sacred Heart. The Colonels won 19-12 in a slugfest on Sunday in which they used nine pitchers.

“We don’t feel like we exposed too many arms too much,” said Silva. “(Auturo) Rodriquez threw 48 pitches. Besides that, nobody threw more than 18 out of the bullpen. All those guys will be available to go on Tuesday.”

All of the Nicholls starting pitchers were limited to 80 pitches during the opening series. In the opener against Sacred Heart in the rain last Friday, Jacob Mayers, the 2023 national Freshman Pitcher of the Year, allowed no hits with three walks while striking out seven in four innings of work.

The starters will be stretched out, Silva said, as the situations warrant.

“It’s leverage innings and what type of stress they are under I think we’ll just gradually increase,” Silva explained. “I think weather has a lot to do with it, too. You’re coming off three days, it’s been freezing cold, rainy. It takes a toll on their bodies, and you are trying to protect these kids from themselves. They all wanna be out there all the time. There’s no lack of toughness or fighting them.

“As a coach, you gotta do a good job of protecting these guys. We’ll try to continually increase their pitch count, but a lot has to do with leverage. I always say pitching in traffic like runner pressure, big moments in the game, how tight it is, how much stress they’re having to throw the ball with. We try to manage that thing and then get them to bounce back.”

Like with extending pitch counts, the busy weeks that lie ahead are by design, according to Silva.

“I think playing all these games early is really important for people to understand. I do that on purpose because it forces us to use different guys, not just the same cast of characters and kind of figure out our team. As a coach, just like players are getting going, we’re trying to figure out where our guys fit best,” said Silva.

Tulane is 2-1after taking two of three games at home over Northwestern State. The Green Wave is coming off a 12-9 win on Sunday in which Connor Rasmussen blasted a grand slam and drove in five runs to power Tulane.

Dillard, of the NAIA, is 2-7 on the season. The Bleu Devils opened the season by losing its first five games before winning two of its next four. Dillard has lost its last two games, falling to Xavier 11-2 and 9-2 in a double-header last Saturday.

Eastern Illinois is 1-2 after winning the second game of a double-header Sunday as part of a three-game series at Florida A&M

The Panthers dropped the opening game on Saturday 6-5 and the first game of the double-headers on Sunday 4-0.

In the win on Sunday, the Panthers blasted three home runs and scored in five different innings to earn their first victory of the season.