LONG BEACH — There were many reasons why UC Irvine’s baseball team was expected to be as good in 2022 as it was in 2021.

Last season’s team set a Big West Conference record for most league wins, pushed Stanford to a regional title game, and the Anteaters believed they could spin another season like that with two-thirds of the starting lineup and eight veteran pitchers returning.

They certainly looked that way Sunday afternoon, when three pitchers held Long Beach State to four hits in a 2-1 win at Blair Field. UCI is now 24-17 overall and 10-8 in Big West play, has 10 one-run wins, and owns the third-best record in league play – Cal Poly is 24-19 overall, 11-7 in conference – with 12 more league games remaining.

But there are a lot of missing numbers in that breakdown. Like UC Santa Barbara (30-10 overall) having dominated league play with a 19-2 record, with the next closest team six games behind and the Anteaters having lost four of their past five series.

The 2021 UCI team hit .314 and had a team ERA of 3.50. The ’22 team is hitting .260 with a 4.31 ERA.

“It’s hard to put a finger on it,” UCI coach Ben Orloff said Sunday. “You always like having returning players, but it’s a new year and things don’t always improve.

“I think we’re playing better, but we haven’t been able to find a way to win. It’s like we’ve been running in the wrong lane and coming out of series disappointed.”

Long Beach came into the three-game series on a 10-game losing streak in a season with its own digressions. But LBSU hit the ball well in a 6-2 win Friday and then held UCI to four hits in a 4-0 shutout win on Saturday.

“It’s the kind of season where you don’t want to look at the standings or what our RPI (Rating Percentage Index) is,” Orloff said.

What the Anteaters have is the time to close – and to do so impressively. They host UCSB next weekend looking to slow the Gaucho train and they have a rematch with nationally ranked UCLA, whom the Anteaters beat in a midweek game last week.

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They’re only a game out of second place in the conference and have the second-highest national RPI (Ratings Percentage Index) among Big West teams. They got key two-out RBI singles from Abe Garcia-Pacheco and Taishi Nakawake, a tag-team effort from Cameron Wheeler, Troy Taylor, and Gordon Ingebritson on the mound (one base runner allowed after the third inning), and right fielder Nathan Church threw a man out at the plate.

“The problematic thing is the Big West is now being looked at as a one-bid conference (for the postseason),” Orloff said. “We deserved a bid in 2019 and didn’t get one, and Santa Barbara deserved one last season and didn’t get it.”

Which explains why looking at the league standings is a bad way to begin a morning.

Long Beach is 17-25 overall and 7-11 in league play. LBSU has series left with struggling UC Riverside (7-33, 3-18) and UC Davis (4-23, 3-15), plus Cal State Bakersfield (16-24, 9-9) and rival Cal State Fullerton (17-24, 10-8).

Juaron Watts-Brown allowed one run on three hits with a career-high 10 strikeouts in six innings for Long Beach on Sunday.

LBSU got an RBI single from Rocco Peppi in the third inning., but UCI tied it on Garcia-Pacheco’s RBI single in the top of the fourth and then took the lead on Nakawake’s RBI single down the right field line in the top of the seventh.

LBSU’s Chase Luttrell had a two-out single in the bottom of the ninth, but UCI induced a pop-up to close it out.

In another Big West game …

Hawaii 17, Cal State Fullerton 3: The Titans (17-24, 10-8) had an early two-run lead, but the Rainbow Warriors (20-19, 13-8) took the lead for good on a grand slam in the bottom of the second inning and crushed the visitors in the rubber game of their series finale. Hawaii scored two runs in the fourth, five in the sixth, two in the seventh and four in the eighth.