For the first time since early February, Northwestern baseball players didn’t spend their Tuesday playing a midweek nonconference game at Rocky Miller Park or fielding grounders from coach Paul Stevens in a practice.
Instead, pitcher Gabe Ribas got a haircut Tuesday afternoon, and leftfielder Dave Gresky initiated a water fight with one of his teammates.
The Wildcats had hoped to use the day to travel to Ohio State for the Big Ten tournament. But after slipping out of playoff contention in the last game of the season Sunday, the end came a little earlier than everyone had hoped, leaving the players with some unwanted free time.
“It’s strange to be trying to take care of your real life for a while instead of focusing on baseball,” said Ribas, a junior. “You don’t get used to it, even after three years, that first Tuesday when you don’t have practice.”
Despite a 1-7 start to the conference season and a miserable first three games in Minnesota this past weekend, it looked like NU might still be headed to the tournament last Sunday.
But the Cats dropped their season finale 4-3 and missed a second consecutive postseason appearance by just half a game in the standings.
With four teams vying for the final two spots in the tournament this weekend, NU only needed to win one of its last four games to qualify. Now, the memory of a sweep will linger until next spring for those players who aren’t graduating.
“I don’t want to say we’re ashamed, but we’re certainly not happy,” Ribas said. “It was a horrible way to go out.”
The Minnesota series exposed a weakness the Cats had been trying to conceal all season — youth.
NU’s roster contains 13 underclassmen, and Stevens didn’t hesitate to hand out playing time and responsibilities to his newcomers. He regularly started rookies at the corners of the outfield and even played one at short for the last few weeks of the season.
“When you first get here, you just want to play, you’re wide-eyed and everything’s going a beat faster than you’re used to,” said Gresky, a freshman. “Then as the season progresses, you want to be in there doing something great for the team. It wasn’t just, ‘Glad to be here.'”
Gresky, the only player to start all 56 games, finished the season hitting .299. Many of his fellow freshmen were also immediate contributors.
But with a starting lineup that rarely featured more than two seniors and only a handful of juniors, the inexperience finally did the Cats in over the weekend. With the playoffs on the line in Minneapolis, the young Cats froze. Collectively, NU hit just .233 and committed 14 errors in the four-game set.
“For the first time all year, you really saw how young our team was,” Ribas said. “A lot of guys don’t understand that you don’t get a whole lot of chances to go to the playoffs. It’s hard to let the younger guys know how important every single game is.”
Ribas is hoping that the rookies will have a newfound appreciation for that importance next year. The Cats split series against bottom-feeders Michigan State and Iowa, and they couldn’t quite pull out a sweep at home against last-place Indiana.
Had they won just one more game in any of those series, Ribas’ hair would still be shaggy and the Cats would be busing to Ohio.
But even if things fell apart at the very end, the playing time the underclassmen received all season mixed with the experience of a tight playoff race should put NU in good position next year.
“We got a lot of young guys in this program right now,” Stevens said. “And the thing I’m excited about is that these are the guys that are putting us in a position to have an opportunity to get to the playoffs.”
It should be more than just an opportunity next year.
NU will lose backstop Joe Hietpas and last week’s Big Ten Pitcher of the Week, Mike Nall, to graduation. The Cats will also lose third baseman Wes Robinson and pitcher J.J. Standring, who missed most of the season with arm troubles.
“Obviously I’d like to be here to taste some of the success,” Nall said “But it’s nice to know that I’m part of their building and growing experience.”
The nucleus of the team returns intact, and three-fourths of this year’s starting rotation will be back — if the trio of juniors doesn’t get scooped up by the Major League Baseball draft next month.
Now, before the rewards really start coming in, the Cats just have to mentally move past Minnesota and wait out the offseason.
“The season’s got to be over some time,” Gresky said. “At first, it’s a little weird. You’re going to need a little break. But after sitting around for a few days, I’m going to get extremely bored.”
