If the Illinois baseball team is to overcome its slow start to the season, a good place to start would be in preventing the crooked number.

In four of their five losses, the Illini have been winning or trailing by just a run in the latter half of the contest before giving up big innings to their opponents, dashing their hopes for a victory. Last Friday, Illinois took a 4-3 lead against East Carolina into the seventh inning before allowing four runs in a 7-5 loss. Two days later, the Illini trailed West Virginia by just a run entering the eighth, when the Mountaineers sealed the win with a five-run frame.

“We’ve had a couple innings where we’ve let up that crooked number, and that’s really what’s come back to bite us,” sophomore starter Brian de la Torriente said. “When you look at the scores of our games, other than the South Florida game (a 12-3 loss), I think we’ve only lost our games by a couple runs. If we can avoid the (big inning), that will help us out big time.”

As Torriente said and the stats indicate, the big innings by opponents have been the result not of a lack of control by the Illinois staff but by a lack of concentration. In 51 innings of work this season, the Illini pitchers have walked just 14 batters. Torriente himself has thrown 10 innings without giving up a base on balls. The problem, he said, has been one bad pitch here and there a few too many times.

“The pitching staff has done a pretty good job of throwing strikes, but we need to work on just keeping the ball down,” said Torriente, who is 0-2 with a 5.40 ERA. “Sometimes we’ll get in some good pitcher’s counts, 1-2 counts, then we’ll leave a pitch over the plate and give them too much of a good pitch to hit.”

The hurlers will have a chance to redeem themselves this weekend at the Caravelle Resort Classic in Conway, S.C. Illinois plays a doubleheader Friday, facing Lipscomb (3-8 entering Wednesday) and No. 12 Coastal Carolina (12-1), which is on a 10-game winning streak. The Illini play Coastal Carolina again on Saturday before finishing the weekend against Ball State (4-9) on Sunday.

Despite the team’s 1-5 start, sophomore center fielder Willie Argo stressed that it’s a long season, pointing out how the Illini began the 2009 campaign 11-2 but played poorly down the stretch and missed the NCAA tournament.

“We know (these early games) are important. We started off good last year but ended up pretty rough, so hopefully this year we can — even though we didn’t start out so good — we can pick it up,” Argo said.

Leading the way for the Illinois offense early on has been first baseman Matt Dittman, who is hitting .526 with four RBIs. Freshman third baseman Brandon Hohl has stepped up as well, hitting .409 with a team-leading six RBIs. Argo hit lead-off last weekend for the first time in his Illini career, with mixed results. He went 2-for-4 with a walk in his debut, but he had just one hit the rest of the weekend and finished the three contests with nine strikeouts.

In Argo’s mind, the early-season struggles can be attributed to the whole team.

“It seems one game we don’t hit, one game we don’t pitch,” he said.

Associate head coach Eric Snider was a little more straightforward.

“We just have to catch the ball, throw the ball, hit the ball,” Snider said. “We got to play the game of baseball. That’s something we haven’t done the last six games.”