There was no joy in Mudville as the mighty Salukis had struck out.

During an eight-day road trip, which included stops in Las Vegas, Nev. and San Antonio, Texas, the SIUC baseball team was outscored 90-56 in nine games, and was dealt 23 consecutive scoreless innings in its final three games of the trip.

March 9-12 the Salukis traveled to Las Vegas, Nev. to battle the University of Nevada Las Vegas and the University of San Diego winning one of the five games.

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SIUC opened the tournament with a 4-2 loss to UNLV despite a strong pitching performance from junior Tory Hatten, who threw five shutout innings before being touched for a run in the sixth that would lead to two more runs in the seventh inning.

The other games of the Las Vegas trip resulted in a hitting contest between Southern and its opponents.

Against UNLV March 10, Southern came up short 15-10, but came back latter that day against San Diego 14-13. SIUC was then punished 27-10 by the Running Rebels March 11, and lost 12-10 against San Diego March 12.

In San Antonio March 13-16, the Salukis started strong against Indiana March 13 with a 8-0 victory behind another strong start by Hatten, who pitched a complete game shutout, but the series went down hill from there with three consecutive losses to Notre Dame March 14 6-2, Oral Roberts 9-0 March 15, and Indiana 4-0 March 16.

SIUC baseball coach Dan Callahan said he was not pleased with the performance of his team through out the road trip.

From a baseball standpoint it was not a very enjoyable trip, he said. Maybe I set my sights too high. I thought we might be able to come back with five or six wins.

I maybe either overestimated our starting pitching, or underestimated our opponents. We played three ranked teams on our trip, and I guess from a coaching standpoint I wonder how well we compete against Oral Roberts, Notre Dame and UNLV if our pitchers throw like they did in the Best Inns Classic (March 1-3 when SIUC swept the tournament with three consecutive victories).

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Freshman third baseman Jerry Hairston, who started the season in a hitting funk, provided the majority of the offense for the Dawgs in Las Vegas, batting .500 (7-14) in the five games.

Hairston’s hitting improvement was not enough, though, as Callahan said the offense had a battle on its hands because of the poor pitching, and was trying to comeback after teams had scored early in the games which the Salukis had lost.

That’s discouraging from an offensive standpoint when your fighting your way out of a hole, he said. There were other instances when we scored early, and we came out and gave up runs defensively.

The road trip drops the Salukis’ overall record to 6-9, and Callahan said he would not have believed his team would perform like it did during the break if someone had predicted the games for him.

If you would have told me we would get shutout 23 innings in a row, I’d say you were nuts, he said. I’d tell you I had a better chance of winning the lottery.