The defensive stats for the Penn State baseball team don't look good.
Nine errors, three games.
"It's not a concern right now," Penn State coach Robbie Wine said.
It's also not a sign of a season full of mistakes.
It was Penn State's first series of the year, away from Medlar Field, outside.
And it was the Nittany Lions' first time playing on a real baseball surface, instead of the artificial turf of Holuba Hall and the Multi-Sport Facility.
In fact, all 10 Big Ten teams are averaging an error per game through the first weekend of the season. Only Minnesota has more errors than Penn State, with 10.
"Anytime you get outside for the first time, it's going to be tough to acclimate," catcher Joe Blackburn said.
"We can attribute a substantial portion of those errors to just not being used to the uniform surface of a place like Multi-Sport where you're not going to get bad hops or Holuba where you're not going to get bad hops."
"Not to mention, the depth perception of the throwing errors, it's different."
The field wasn't the only thing that caused the errors.
Penn State has only been practicing since the beginning of February, and the team is still raw.
Blackburn said that once the team begins playing as a whole, the errors will be cut down, adding that the errors are from not being on the same page with the fielder who's throwing the ball.
Five of the errors were throwing errors, so Wine put a little pressure on his team by using a stopwatch to time how long it takes from the ball being put in play to an out being recorded.
"The things that bug you the most are the mental errors, and I think a couple of those throwing errors were mental errors," Wine said.
"... The quicker this team gets back on the field, the better we're going to be."
The Nittany Lions, unlike southern teams, don't have the advantage to play on an actual baseball diamond, instead playing indoors, without dirt and without true hops.
In the second game of last weekend's High Point series, three of the 14 runs were unearned, a result from five Penn State errors.
High Point only made two errors during the enitre three-game series against the Lions.
"Unearned runs as a result of errors are something you have control over and when the result is runs for the other team, it's even worse than just having an error and it not amounting to anything," Blackburn said.
