Erik Bird is a sophomore relief pitcher for Nebraska who will contribute a weekly journal to CollegeBaseballInsider.com in 2007. Bird, a native of Omaha, Neb., went 0-2 with a 0.82 ERA as a freshman and becomes closer for the Cornhuskers this year. Opponents hit only .218 and only 2 of 23 inherited runners scored off of him in 2006. Bird's brother Brandon pitched for Creighton and helped the Bluejays to the NCAA tourney in 2005.

 

 

 

March 22, 2007

Conference Play has Arrived

 

Last time I left you with the nightmare trip to Florida. We traveled to Alabama last weekend, and we were all pretty excited about it. Alabama has a good atmosphere down there, and they’re a pretty good SEC team - they won the SEC last year so we were pretty  pumped to go down there and play. 

 

Friday night was pretty rocky, though. I think we lost 8-0, and nobody played well at all, but we really bounced back the next two games and won both of them to take the series. That was a pretty good weekend all together. 

 

Then, we played our first home midweek game versus Wayne State and beat them 6-1.  It was good to play at home finally, in front of our home crowd and to see everybody cheering for us for once. 

 

We started conference this weekend; we went down to Lubbock. 

 

I was hoping they would have had a better crowd, but they didn’t really have it sold out. I was thinking they would maybe have had it sold out since we were starting conference and everything, but they didn’t, so that was pretty disappointing. 

 

We lost the Thursday night game, again, in extra innings. It was a pretty good game. We could have won it, but we lost on a passed ball. 

 

Then Friday came along, and we knew we had to win. Charlie Shirek really pitched a good game. I think he went seven innings and gave up one run, which was something we really needed to spark up our team. It was good to see our offense and our pitching staff click like that. We beat them 13-1, so we thought we had a bunch of momentum going into Saturday’s game. It started off pretty good and we jumped up 2-0. They came back, and they kept battling back. We were really fighting back and forth all game long. 

 

We ended up scoring two runs in the top of the ninth to tie it 8-8 and get to the bottom half. Their leadoff hitter hit a walk-off home run. It was a big rollercoaster of emotions right there, scoring two runs in the top of the ninth to tie it up, and then one swing of the bat and game over, just like that. It was definitely a learning weekend.

 

We’re pretty excited to be at home this week. We have two midweek games this week and then we have Missouri at home, so hopefully we will turn it around, and we’ll get some momentum going into the rest of conference play.


Erik Bird

 

Previous Entries

Road Rage (3/11/07)

Feels Like the First Time (3/2/07)

Greetings from the Heartland (2/23/07)

 

(photo courtesy of Nebraska Media Relations Office)