Penn State starting pitcher Jim Farrell was playing with fire through all of the Nittany Lions’ game against Northwestern on Wednesday.
Farrell allowed the leadoff man to reach base in four of his six innings of work, facing jams early and often.
But when the first-round game of the Big Ten championships ended, it was the Wildcats who had been burned.
Farrell and reliever Clint Eury combined for a five-hit shutout as No. 4 seed Penn State defeated No. seed 5 NU 6-0 at Siebert Field in Minneapolis. The Cats now find themselves in the losers bracket of the double-elimination tournament.
“We just had a lot of missed opportunities,” NU left fielder Dan Pohlman said. “We got guys on base, but we didn’t do the things we had to do to bring them home.”
In all, the Cats stranded 14 baserunners.
In a sequence that set the tone for the rest of the game, NU loaded the bases in the second inning with nobody out. But Farrell came up big, striking out senior Ken Padgett, senior Eric Roeder and freshman Mark Ori to maintain a scoreless tie.
It was more of the same in the next inning. With David Gresky 90 feet from home, Farrell struck out Pohlman to end the third frame.
To make matters worse, the Cats’ usually-dependable starting pitcher Dan Konecny was far from his peak.
“When you do it right, a fastball is an all right pitch,” he said. “But then it got down, and I wasn’t hitting my spot exactly. They really didn’t get any good hacks at my pitches, but the point is that they hit them.”
Konecny was charged with five earned runs in his six-plus innings of work. The junior scattered nine hits and walked three.
Penn State’s Eury and Wes Reohr got things started in the fifth, driving in one run apiece off Konecny to make the score 2-0.
Reohr claimed the offensive superlatives for the day, going 3-for-4 with an RBI and two runs scored.
For the Cats, Pohlman was the only batter to have a multi-hit game with two.
With the loss, the Cats now have no room for error. NU faces No. 6 Indiana today at 12:05 p.m. The Hoosiers dropped their first-round contest 7-2 to No. 3 seed Michigan.
NU will send No. 2 starter J.A. Happ (7-5, 3.20 ERA) to the mound tomorrow against Indiana’s Josh Lewis (4-2, 5.16).
“We have the utmost confidence in (Happ). When we need him, he’s there,” Konecny said. “We have to come through the losers’ bracket, but we have the pitching staff to come through. If anyone in the Big Ten can do it, our team can.”
The Daily’s Ariel Alexovich contributed to this report.
