Well, that was quite the 180. After starting out the season, 5-1, including a sweep of San Diego State and a win at Mississippi State, Arizona State (6-5) seems miles away from that great form as their 7-2 loss to UC Irvine sealed the sweep at home.

From the first pitch, the kilter was off with starter Timmy Manning. Having shown promising potential to this point, Manning surprisingly couldn’t find a rhythm on the mound and came out wild, issuing two walks and a hit-by-pitch in the first inning. Add in two RBI hits and a sacrifice fly, and Manning was pulled from the game after recording just one out, placing the Sun Devils in a hole they wouldn’t recover from.

UCI’s 3-run first inning would end up being the only offense they would need to topple Arizona State on Sunday, but the Anteaters didn’t settle after their first-inning outburst. In relief of Manning, Jonah Giblin came on to try to stop the bleeding and allowed just two runs over nearly five innings of work. However, Giblin could’ve been perfect, and it wouldn’t have been enough for the anemic Sun Devil bats.

In what’s been a collectively-inconsistent start to the season offensively, the up-and-down Sun Devils were flat on the ground against UCI’s Nick Pinto. The junior lefty came out dealing against ASU, pitching five masterful innings with seven strikeouts and just one baserunner allowed on 64 pitches.

While Pinto shoved, Jonah Giblin held the floodgates back, but that didn’t stop water from seeping through. After taking over for Manning, Giblin let in a sacrifice fly and another run in the second to quickly put ASU in a 5-0 hole. This deficit was nothing like the seven-run one ASU overcame in the midweek against North Dakota State, but the difference between the Bison and Anteaters was Nick Pinto’s work on the mound.

Making his second start of the season on Sunday, hardly anybody would have the performance coming from Pinto. The box score won’t show just how nasty he was, as Pinto rode his fastball and breaking stuff to keep Sun Devil hitters off balance early on. However, Pinto was pulled for arm management after the fifth, possibly opening the door for ASU to tee off on a bullpen that they saw success on in Saturday’s contest. Trailing 5-0, the fearsome lineup tried its best to fight back, but it was to no avail.

Plenty of aspects of this game mirrored that of the nightmare season that occurred in 2022. In his rookie year as a coach, Willie Bloomquist’s boys went plenty of games desperately searching for outs out of the pitchers. And while Blake Pivaroff, Dylan Gardner, and Brock Peery all pitched scorelessly in relief, it was the early struggles of Manning that encapsulated the loss best. The parallels of last year also came out of the lineup, as Ryan Campos and Jacob Tobias provided the only meaningful work at the plate with multi-hit games, including a 430-foot blast from Tobias in the eighth.

However, it would be too little and too late to mount any serious comeback effort. ASU’s loss to UCI marks their fifth in the last six games after starting the season 5-0. The pitching staff has quickly regressed from world-beaters to pedestrians, as ASU starters began the year with 20+ straight scoreless innings, only for all three to get hit around this weekend by the Anteaters.

If ASU pitching thought UCI hitting was tough, they are in for quite the challenge come Tuesday, where they will travel to Stillwater and face the No. 12 ranked Oklahoma State Cowboys. As one of the most prolific hitting teams in the nation, having clubbed 11 home runs as a team and scoring over double-digits in three of their last four games. Either Owen Stevenson and/or Matt Tieding will be charged with that tall task, according to Sam Peraza.

Some will call it an underestimation, others just a straight-up bad performance, but ASU’s three defeats against UCI are certainly a negative sign, and fans and players alike hope it’s the wake-up call for the Sun Devils as their schedule picks up on Tuesday with another challenging road trip.

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