JetHawks' can't find consistency

It took the JetHawks more than a month after a horrendous 2-25 month of June to start looking like a winning club, but they did. They won six in a row at one point and eight of nine during a stretch ear-lier this month. They carried new-found confidence in the clubhouse.

One week on the road and that's all gone. The JetHawks are playing bad baseball again, mak-ing poor pitches, failing to get clutch hits and booting routine ground balls. They've lost four of five on the road trip with no signs of improvement.

"We ran into some hot teams on the road," JetHawks catcher J.D. Closser said. "We ran into tough places to score runs."

Manager Scott Coolbaugh says that's part of the problem. The JetHawks can beat the bottom of the barrel team, but pit them against contenders and they fold.

"That's been the biggest disap-pointment," Coolbaugh said. "We haven't been able to get over the hump against teams in the upper echelon of the league."

The JetHawks opened August 11-5, but nine of those 11 wins came against Visalia, Modesto and Rancho Cucamonga. Those are the only three teams besides Lancas-ter with losing records.

"We haven't been able to sus-tain a consistent level of play for a long time," Coolbaugh said. "We did go through that streak of six in a row, but it almost seems we just caught teams at a bad time. Visal-ia was going through a bad time, Rancho was going through a bad time."

With Lancaster's final 10 games coming against playoff-bound teams that doesn't bode well for the rest of the season. At the start of this road trip, Coolbaugh hoped for a 10-5 finish to the sea-son. Now, he'll be happy with 30 second-half wins. That's 3-7 over the final 10 games.

"That'll be one more than the first half," Coolbaugh said.

Record safe
With the team struggling de-fensively lately (20 errors in the last six games), Lancaster's coach-ing staff began to wonder if the JetHawks were approaching a league record.

Don't worry guys, you're not even close.

The JetHawks have committed 202 errors in 130 games. To set the record, they'd have to average 18 a game down the stretch. That's be-cause in 1946, Visalia committed 383 errors.

"Wow," JetHawks pitching coach Mike Parrott said. "That must have been like watching a little league team."

Uploaded August 26, 2001