The Eastern baseball team will have to wait until it faces a ranked opponent to get its first win, as Tuesday’s game was postponed due to soft field conditions. Indiana State was expected to be the Panthers’ first opponent at home this season. The make-up game between the two will take place on April 27 at 3 p.m. at Coaches Stadium.

Fayetteville, Arkansas is where the Panthers will head for a three game series this upcoming weekend.

Arkansas is currently ranked No. 18 in the nation and will be the second SEC ranked opponent Eastern has seen already this season.

Up until this weekend the Panthers are winless in the eight games they have played, but the run deferential between them and their opponents has not been extremely significant.

Half of the games they have contended in have been lost by two runs or less. As the team slowly rolls into March, games begin to progress and Coach Jason Anderson feels so far that his team has made no inadvertent mistakes.

“We’ve lost eight games, but we’ve been in seven of them,” Anderson said. “This weekend is going to be an extremely tough weekend and a good challenge for us, but we’ve competed well and played well, we just haven’t come out with a win yet.”

The message Anderson gives to his team in winless drought is to keep coming out and expecting to win.

Highly energetic is the way Anderson describes the young team who continues to battle each and every game while making quick jumps at the plate to adjust when necessary. Starting senior catcher, Jason Scholl, one of Eastern’s top hitters, was cleated in the eye this past weekend at a play at the plate forcing him to miss last Sundays game.

“He received a few stitches and his vision is fine. But he is lucky,” Anderson said.

The team hopes to have him back by this weekend but he remains day-to-day.

The small ball aspect of things is allocative to the Panther’s offensive scheme. Laying down bunts, hitting sacrifice flies, and just coming through with a clutch hit all need to be in a line for every game in order to get runs across the board.

Anderson senses right now that is not consistently happening because of his team’s inexperience. With every game comes another adaptation for the Panthers in the early weeks of the 2016 season.

The first home game for the Panthers will be March 22 against Robert Morris at 3 p.m.

Jack Arkus can be reached at 581-2812 or jtarkus@eiu.edu