As the post-season approaches, the UW Oshkosh baseball team remains focused on improving their game after coming off of a two-game loss.

Ripon College defeated UWO 5-0 in the opener and 12-1 in seven innings during the second game on Saturday in Oshkosh.

The Red Hawks started the opening game with a two-run homer hit by Michael Barnes in the first inning.

Titan’s Alex Koch, Matt McNabb, Dylan Ott, Jonathan Selchow and Hunter Staniske all had team-leading two hits during the first game.

Ott played all nine positions as he started the contest at catcher and ended at shortstop. Ott played at least one full inning at each position besides pitcher, where he recorded one out and walked one batter in his collegiate pitching debut during the ninth inning in the first contest of the day.

Titan pitcher Colan Treml is on the way to becoming the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference’s all-time leader with 297 career innings pitched. After striking out five batters in this contest, Treml has now moved into seventh in D-III history with 239 strikeouts and ninth with 24 wins.

“As a team, we are working on being better situational hitters as well as locating our pitches better on the mound,” Treml said. “You can never stop improving in the game of baseball, so we are working everyday to become the best we possibly can.”

Treml said he is honored to move into seventh place on the all-time strikeouts list but has his sights set higher.

“It feels great to earn this accomplishment,” Treml said. “The constant hours of practicing and working are paying off. However, being first in WIAC history for strikeouts would feel a lot better.”

With plenty of innings left to pitch, Treml said he plans to work his way up the history books for career strikeouts with a strong defense behind him.

After the Titans tallied ten errors against the Red Hawks, left fielder Chris Atwood said the team needs to work on eliminating poor play.

“As a team, we know our jobs and what we need to do to win games,” Atwood said. “As we move forward, we will remain focused on making the plays when they come to us.”

Freshman catcher Kade Bohlman said coach preaches defense and the team knows what it needs to do to win games.

“Defense wins games,” Bohlman said. “These next four games are crucial for us. We will be focusing on doing the little things right, as coach would say.”

“I want to see our team come together and finish the season strong. Each individual on our team plays an important role and without them, we can’t succeed,” Treml said. “We all know that we have what it takes to beat anybody in our conference, we just need to put it all together and make it happen.”

Due to the weather, the game against Wisconsin Lutheran College on last Tuesday was postponed. The Titans will travel to Platteville to start their four game series against UW- Platteville on Friday.