After a hot start to the Big Ten Tournament this week, Indiana baseball quieted down on Saturday morning.
The third-seeded Hoosiers suffered their first loss of the tournament in Omaha, a 4-2 defeat to No. 2 seed Nebraska.
The teams will face off again this evening at 6 p.m. ET in a do-or-die game for both sides. The winner advances to the Big Ten championship game, while the loser will suffer its second loss of the tournament and go home.
IU (32-23-1) brought the tying run to the plate in the ninth inning after a leadoff single by Jasen Oliver. But the Hoosiers struggled to sustain rallies all game against Nebraska junior Will Walsh, and they couldn’t get Oliver further than first base. Walsh pitched a complete game for the Cornhuskers (36-20), allowing two earned runs on six hits, one walk, and two hit batters, with five strikeouts in 121 total pitches.
Indiana took the lead in the first inning on back-to-back doubles on two straight pitches from juniors Josh Pyne and Nick Mitchell. But the Hoosiers missed a chance to create some separation in the second inning, leaving the bases loaded. That was their best opportunity of the gam, and they paid the price quickly for wasting it. In the top of the third inning, Nebraska junior Josh Caron swatted a rocket of a three-run home run 434 feet over the left-field wall.
The Hoosiers got one run back in the bottom of the third on a sacrifice fly, but got only two hits the rest of the game.
IU starter Ty Bothwell pitched well outside of that third inning, finishing with the three earned runs on five hits and a hit batsman with no walks and nine strikeouts across 4 ⅓ innings. Graduate student Drew Buhr gave IU some really quality innings out of the bullpen, but allowed another towering home run to Caron in the eighth.
Caron was recently named a semifinalist for the Buster Posey National Collegiate Catcher of the Year Award by the Greater Wichita Area Sports Commission, and Saturday’s performance backed up that recognition.
Indiana head coach Jeff Mercer removed star outfielder Devin Taylor from the game entering the top of the eighth inning. Taylor was 0 for 3 on the day, but entered Saturday with a .360 batting average and a 1.117 OPS. He would’ve hit with two outs in the ninth inning and represented the tying run had he remained in the contest, but instead, freshman Andrew Wiggins pinch hit and struck out to end the game. It’s unclear why Taylor left the game.
IU was the home team in Saturday morning’s game, as the team with the better tournament record. But the crowd at Charles Schwab Field, around an hour away from Nebraska’s campus in Lincoln, was extremely pro-Husker.
The Daily Hoosier –“Where Indiana fans assemble when they’re not at Assembly”
- Find us on Facebook: thedailyhoosier
- You can follow us on Twitter: @daily_hoosier
- Seven ways to support completely free IU coverage at no cost to you.
