BASEBALL SEASON ANALYSIS
Coming into this season, coach Paul Stevens didn’t know what to expect from a team with a mix of young, inexperienced players and a small core group of veterans.
But the Wildcats ended where they have so many times before, hovering around .500.
This marked the 11th time in Stevens’ 18 seasons at NU that the Cats finished with a losing record. A second straight 14-18 Big Ten campaign resulted in NU being shut out of the Big Ten tournament for the second consecutive season.
“With a pitch here or there, a play in the field or a hit, we could have been right there in the (Big Ten) tournament and giving people a run,” Stevens said. “But any program in the country that loses its top two pitchers is going to struggle a little bit.”
Coming off a 26-28-1 season last year, the Wildcats lost their top three starting pitchers and four of eight starting position players to graduation, injury or the Major League Baseball Draft.
NU opened the season with its four starters combining for 13 career starts.
Junior pitcher Dan Brauer was supposed to be the ace of the staff this season but was lost for the season after an offseason injury.
“Once Danny went down, the scenario was we had to make things with with what we had left,” Stevens said. “And what we had left was a lot of young, inexperienced pitchers.”
Those starting pitchers, senior Evan Blesoff and sophomores George Kontos, Ryan Myers and Andrew Smith, were 15-22 this season with a 5.70 ERA. The pitching staff as a whole was ninth in the Big Ten with a 5.58 ERA.
The Cats did not have the same struggles offensively, and it was a record-setting year for one NU player.
Junior Pat McMahon, a First-Team All-Big Ten designated hitter, recorded an NU record 82 hits and became the first NU player to hit .400 or above since current San Diego Padres second baseman Mark Loretta hit .408 in 1993.
As a team the Cats were sixth in the conference with a .302 average.
But inconsistencies in the young team led to its seventh-place Big Ten finish.
After winning the first three games in a home series against Iowa, NU not only put itself in a good position to make the conference tournament, but with a 10-9 conference record and two of the last three conference series at home, could have been thinking about a good seed.
But in the sixth inning of the final game against Iowa, the eventual third-place Big Ten team, sophomore second baseman Caleb Fields collided with freshman center fielder Aaron Newman sending Fields, and the Cats’ season, into a tailspin.
With Fields sitting out recovering from a concussion, NU lost that game and went 2-8 in his absence, including a five-game losing streak directly following the injury.
“Caleb was on a roll, and I fully believe that had a huge bearing on how things went the rest of the season,” Stevens said.
NU has three of four starting pitchers returning next season, junior Dan Brauer will make a comeback, and eight of the 10 players who started at least 25 games in the field for NU will be back for another season.
“We got guys a lot of experience this year going from the refrigerator to the frying pan,” Stevens said. “And I think there’s a lot of pieces to the puzzle coming back.
“We’re going to be awfully, awfully interesting for teams to have to contend with.”
Reach Abe Rakov at [email protected].
