Auburn baseball vs. UAB Blazers midweek preview

Auburn baseball, coming off of a rough pitching series, will hit the road one more time to Birmingham. There, the UAB Blazers await at Regions Field, home of the Birmingham Barons.

While UAB is no Florida or LSU, they’re still a Division I baseball squad and are capable of winning any game at any time. Let’s talk about it.

UAB Blazers preview

The Blazers stand at 9-18 on the year and 3-6 in Conference USA play. You gotta applaud their consistency: perfectly .333 on the season.  In fact, we’ll take it a step further. They are exactly .333 at home, .333 on the road, and .333 at neutral sites. It’s pretty easy to predict this team will win 1 of every 3 games.

These two teams saw each other in non-conference play and the Tigers came out on top 4-1. That was at a time when Auburn’s pitching was getting the job done in the latter innings. Fast forward to now, and the bullpen is crumbling like wet paper.

Auburn baseball projected lineup

The lineup shouldn’t be too dissimilar from what we’ve seen the last few games. The reason for this is that the bats aren’t the problem with this team in conference play. In fact, on most teams, these bats would be Omaha worthy.

If UAB goes with righty Braxton Shelton on the mound, then we can expect a lineup much like the one from Saturday against Hurston Waldrep. Expect Ike Irish to stay in the 3 hole and bombers Bryson Ware and Tommy Kirby to stay at 4-5.

Auburn baseball projected starter

Drew Nelson will likely get the nod as the typical midweek starter. His most recent outing was a beautiful one: 7 innings of one run ball in a run-rule win over North Alabama.

Behind Nelson is a faltering bullpen that just got beat up like the smallest kid in the class who has a lot of lunch money. Florida hung 17 runs on this bullpen over the final two games. Not good. We’re gonna need these guys to come up clutch to win this one. That or a Drew Nelson masterclass.

As always, War Eagle.