With the postseason set to begin Friday, the Owensboro RiverDawgs are looking to get back on track after a bit of a late-season slump.
At least two regular season games remain, starting today with a matchup against a streaking Henderson Flash squad that recently jumped ahead of Owensboro in the Ohio Valley League East Division standings.
With a few key players sidelined by injuries, the RiverDawgs went 4-6 over their last 10 games — the Flash went 9-1 in that same stretch. Owensboro manager Vic Evans knows tonight’s game in Henderson could determine who earns the top seed for the postseason.
“The game with Henderson becomes the biggest game we’ve played all year,” he said. “Any chances we have of winning the division, we have to win.”
Owensboro’s game Sunday night at Dubois County was washed out midway through due to rain, but it could be added back to the schedule. If winning the contest could allow the RiverDawgs to win the East Division — final standings are determined by win percentage if all teams do not play an equal number of games — it will be played Wednesday.
Evans was hoping to work his injured players back into the lineup to get Owensboro headed in the right direction before Friday.
“We had a couple of big guys in our lineup that have been hurt and they were going to come back tonight,” he said of Sunday’s rainout. “We wanted to get them some reps in these last couple of games.”
Evans said the last couple of weeks have not been a result of necessarily poor play, but they haven’t been able to find enough runs with the absence of a few big bats.
“We’ve hit a rough patch where we haven’t really played bad, but we really haven’t played good and anything that can go wrong has gone wrong,” he said. “That just happens sometimes.”
Key for the last few games and the postseason will be the pitching staff, Evans said, as they’ve allowed too many free bases lately.
“We’ve just had it where it takes one hit to score a bunch of runs because we’re putting way to many men on base,” he said. “We’re working with pitchers and making them aware of it. For us to be successful in the postseason, our pitchers have got to do a better job of commanding the zone.”
Regardless of their finish in the regular season, the RiverDawgs and all the OVL teams will make the postseason. After a play-in game between the No. 4 and No. 5 teams, the rest of the tournament will be a best-of-three format through the championship series.
Though they’ve got solace in having a postseason no matter what, Evans said Owensboro is still going to do whatever they can earn the No. 1 seed.
“We’re going to do everything we can to win the division up to the point we don’t want to screw up our pitching rotation,” he said. “There will be pitchers we may have to hold back because the overall goal is still to win the playoffs. We like having that Eastern Division trophy in Owensboro and we’re going to do everything we can to keep it.”
