Seymour baseball coach Jeremy Richey said he will be glad when the Owls stop running into Division I pitchers.
The Owls lost 4-0 to Bedford North Lawrence on Alumni Night at American Legion Field on Monday.
Austin Long, who will pitch at Indiana University, recorded the shutout for Bedford North Lawrence.
“(Long) is the fourth D-I arm we’ve seen in the last two weeks, and we’re not scoring a lot of runs off those guys,” Richey said.
Other Division I pitchers the Owls have faced this season were from Columbus North, Lowell, Michigan, and Jeffersonville.
Seymour did not score against the North or Jeffersonville pitchers.
Austin Long held the Owls (3-5) to two hits while striking out seven and walking two. Seth Maki led off the bottom of the second with a double to left-center but was left stranded at second base.
With two out in the seventh, Tyler Bloom singled to right field, but the next batter flied out to right.
The only other baserunners the Owls had were walks to Luis Munoz in the fourth inning and Satoshi Hirose in the seventh.
Richey said he thinks the Owls are getting better swings than they were earlier in the season.
“I think we’re getting to balls more,” he said. “Our guys that we expect to do things put the ball in play. We just didn’t get anything to show for it.
“(Bedford North Lawrence) played well. We knew coming in that they are a really good team, and we knew we were going to have to make things happen, and unfortunately we couldn’t get a lot of guys on base because Long (3-0) mixed it up and threw well. I thought his off-speed stuff for strikes was big for him.”
The Stars (9-2) used a walk and double to take a 1-0 lead in the first inning, then sent eight batters to the plate in the third inning against Tyler Bloom and bunched five hits and a hit batsman into two runs. Bedford had back-to-back hits and took advantage of an Owls error in the fourth to score its final run.
Drew Hensley, Michael Underwood and Brody Tanksley, the top three batters in the Stars’ lineup, had two hits apiece, with Hensley and Underwood each scoring two runs and Tanksley had two RBIs.
“You look at their stats and they’ve got some guys that can swing it, but they’ve got some guys that have played three or four years,” Richey said. “This is kind of the year they’ve been waiting on.”
Richey looks for the Owls’ bats to come to life tonight against Madison.
“We’re not going to take many negatives away from tonight,” he said. “We’ve just got to get better at the plate. We had one error, but it was a pretty clean game.
Richey said the defense has been solid.
“We’re just going to keep chugging along offensively and hope that comes around. I’m pretty proud of us defensively. I think we’ve played pretty well to this point defensively.”