Baseball
Junior left fielder Anthony Wycklendt swung and missed at a 1-2 Rory Meister fastball to close out a 1-0 Ohio State win Sunday.
About an hour and a half later, when Michigan downed Indiana, the Wildcats knew their season would end after the last regular-season game.
In a must-win series, Northwestern (23-26, 11-17 Big Ten) fell to the Buckeyes (31-16, 14-11) three times in the four-game series, while enough teams moved out of reach of NU to keep the Cats out of the Big Ten tournament for the second straight year.
“I’m disappointed,” NU coach Paul Stevens said after finding out his team would not be one of the six competing in the postseason. “When you work as hard as a lot of these guys, you’d like to see people get some reward. I think that would have been a huge tribute to a lot of the individuals, from seniors on down.”
In a season filled with bad breaks and bounces, it was fitting that a few of these turned the Ohio State series from a potential win to a crushing loss.
Senior starter Evan Blesoff gave up nothing but seeing-eye singles in a six-run first inning Friday. He later retired 18 straight batters, but the Cats still lost 7-2.
And after splitting the Saturday doubleheader — NU took the first game 9-6 and lost the second 10-2 — the Cats amassed only two hits Sunday and watched as some hard-hit balls fell directly into the gloves of the Buckeyes, wasting sophomore Ryan Myers’ stellar start.
“Usually there’s nothing you can do about it,” said Myers, who surrendered one run on six hits in six innings. “But today it hurts more because we had to have this win. To lose a close game like this, it’s a tough one.”
NU also got complete games out of Blesoff, who allowed seven earned runs in nine innings, and sophomore George Kontos, who completed Saturday’s first seven-inning game while allowing five earned.
Sophomore catcher Geoff Dietz was one of the few bright spots for the Cats on Sunday. Despite going 0 for 3 at the plate, Dietz threw out all four attempted base-stealers after allowing all four Buckeyes to steal in his two Saturday starts.
“I pretty much try to make the same throw every time,” said Dietz, who replaced junior Pat McMahon behind the dish because, Stevens said, McMahon’s arm wasn’t healthy. “Sometimes they get there, sometimes they don’t. It’s just a matter of consistency, mostly.”
McMahon, the designated hitter in the last three games, saw his 14-game hitting streak snapped Sunday, but with a .412 batting average he remains the Big Ten’s leading hitter with one week left.
The Cats now have lost eight of nine since taking the first three games of the Iowa series two weeks ago. They sit in eighth place in the Big Ten with only a home series against ninth-place Michigan State remaining.
“It’s tough to swallow, but we’ve still got another weekend,” Dietz said. “It’s pride now.”
Stevens said although his team won’t be making a postseason appearance, it isn’t because of lack of heart.
“I still think that these guys will be giving a maximum amount of effort this weekend and trying to finish as well as they possibly can,” Stevens said. “These guys have really battled through thick and thin and really played a lot of people very tough. It just wasn’t in the cards.”
Reach Patrick Dorsey at [email protected].
