Eleven walks — and killers in the 10th inning of a non-conference loss to a light-hitting, sub-.500 team — will make a baseball manager say some weird things. West Virginia’s Randy Mazey is not exempt, and he was not pleased after last night’s performance in a loss to Canisius.

His team isn’t playing great, but it’s not playing poorly, either. WVU is above average, I’d say.

The Mountaineers were hot for a stretch at the start of the season and then cooled off, and a 2-3 start in the Big 12 isn’t bad when it includes three games at TCU and two wins at Kansas — at and at, mind you — with a snow out against the Jayhawks that maybe robbed WVU of a sweep.

Still, WVU is a step off last year’s pace, and the offense isn’t hitting the ball quite as hard or as far, which is maybe strange for a team that doesn’t get a lot of walks, either. Unlucky? Whatever the case, it’s coincided with a rise in sacrifice bunts. (Aside: Cheeky finish here.) What’s perhaps concerning to Mazey and why he sounded as he did last night was how the non-conference losses last season — a bunch of them — conspired to cost the team when the time came for at-large bids to the NCAA tournament.

And Mazey knows the schedule, which does the team no favors early in every season, is friendly now. The Mountaineers started a stretch of five straight and 14 of 15 games at home with a loss, and that’s no way to begin a run in which they won’t even leave the state. The regular season ends May 21 and WVU has two Big 12 road series and one non-conference game at Pitt the rest of the way. So pardon Mazey if he sounded the alarm last night.