Awakening groggily from an afternoon nap Monday, members of the Northwestern baseball team were a little disoriented.
After a blur of a weekend – one that didn’t end until 3 a.m. Monday – the Wildcats woke up to find themselves in an unfamiliar position: playoff territory.
For the first time all season, NU isn’t clawing at a Big Ten tournament bid from the bowels of the conference standings.
The Cats (23-28) are in their best position of the season heading into today’s nonconference home finale against Western Michigan (24-24). Now in fifth place, they need to stay in the top six to make the Big Ten tournament.
The Cats lingered in last place to start the season, inched up in the standings slowly and then caught a glimpse of playoff contention for about 20 minutes two weekends ago before tumbling back out of the picture.
But a fairy-tale weekend in State College, Pa., has NU solidly rooted in the run for the Big Ten tournament, which the team qualified for last season for the first time since 1995.
NU has by no means cemented its spot in the playoffs with only one week remaining in the regular season, but the Cats can now insist that they’re still in it without grimacing.
“We’re not definitely in, so we know that we need to win some games up in Minnesota,” said infielder Matt Thompson, last weekend’s hero. “But we’re confident we can win if we play the way we played this weekend.”
The Cats gave away the weekend opener against Penn State 14-6, but rebounded with two complete-game pitching performances in a sweep of Saturday’s doubleheader. On Sunday Thompson broke a ninth-inning tie with a two-out, pinch-hit double.
Zach Schara, coming on in relief in an attempt to redeem his loss as Friday’s starter, piled on the excitement in the bottom of the ninth.
With the tying and winning runs at the corners and two outs, Penn State attempted a double steal. Schara ran down the culprit at third for the final out of the game and then immediately bolted – arms in the air – toward an overflowing dugout.
“It was pretty devastating after Friday’s loss,” NU coach Paul Stevens said. “But I can’t tell you how exciting it was in the dugout on Sunday.
“It wasn’t a pretty scenario and the guys executed all day – it was one of the few times everything has clicked.”
The Cats’ success this weekend was largely dependent on the action elsewhere in the Big Ten.
Michigan lost three of four to Michigan State, leaving them percentage points behind NU in the standings. And Illinois had the weekend off, permitting NU to leapfrog the Illini for one of the coveted six spots.
In the collegiate version of scoreboard watching, the Cats spent most of their down-time in the dugout this weekend listening for other Big Ten game updates over the public address system.
And going into the final week, Thompson has the Big Ten schedules of all of NU’s nearest competitors already mapped out.
Ask the Cats now and they’ll insist that they never had any doubt about being in contention come May.
But it was a hard point to argue after NU opened the Big Ten season by dropping three of four games to Illinois, the squad it’s now hoping to fend off. Things looked even more grim the next weekend after the Cats were swept on their home diamond by the Boilermakers.
“Even after we lost all those games to Purdue, we knew that it was still possible to make the tournament,” Thompson said. “That was our lowest point, but we never gave in to losing.”
NU has also received comfort from the memory of last season.
A year ago the Cats took their run for the playoffs down to the wire, clinching a tournament bid with only two games left in the conference season.
“We’ve never really been secure until the end,” Thompson said. “I thought this weekend was more exciting than last year and last year was pretty exciting.”
