After dropping 10 spots in the Top 25 on Monday, No. 14 Auburn lost its fourth straight game Tuesday night in Birmingham, falling to UAB 8-2.
“It’s not just our opponents, but it has more to do with us,” Auburn head coach Butch Thompson said. “Sometimes a team hits a stretch and I think we are in ours now. We will have to make sure we evaluate ourselves and not just our opponents. We need to make some adjustments. We need to learn our lessons quickly at this point in the season.”
The Tigers and Blazers traded single runs in the third and fourth innings, but UAB took a 3-1 lead in the fifth and never looked back. UAB scored two runs in the fifth, single runs in the sixth and seventh and three in the eighth.
After leaving 22 runners on base in its 15-inning loss to Alabama Sunday, Auburn left 13 men on base Tuesday, going 4-for-17 with runners on base and 3-for-12 with runners in scoring position.
“I think it’s mental more than physical at this point,” Thompson said. “Everybody at this point in the season is a little banged up. We definitely have our share but so does every team. It just becomes a mind game of going with what you got and pulling together as a team.
“The umpires, all that, you can find all these excuses to distract … I think we can have better effort, better body language, better execution all the way around. For a brief moment I thought we felt sorry for ourselves tonight and that can’t be the case.”
Auburn starter Christian Camacho (2-3) took the loss allowing three runs on five hits in 4.2 innings of work. He finished the night with a career-high six strikeouts.
Catcher Damon Haecker finished with two of Auburn’s eight hits and one RBI. Dylan Ingram and Will Holland each finished 1-for-3 with a run scored.
Jonah Todd finished 0-for-4 to end his 16-game hitting streak.
Colton Schultz, Brewer Hicklen and Price Visintainer each finished with two RBI for UAB.
Auburn dropped to 32-18 on the season while UAB improved to 23-26.
Auburn will return to action Thursday night as it begins a three-game series in Baton Rogue vs. No. 15 LSU. Thursday night’s game is set for 6:30 p.m. CST on ESPN2. Friday’s game will begin at 7 p.m., while the series finale Saturday will begin at noon on the SEC Network.
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