Hlas: Hawkeyes baseball team flying high, to Houston

IOWA CITY — The trick for his team, Iowa baseball coach Rick Heller said Monday, is to leave behind the euphoria of winning the Big Ten tournament.

'That can't be the end-all,' Heller said after his Hawkeyes gathered in Carver-Hawkeye Arena Monday morning to watch the telecast of the NCAA tournament selection show. That's when they learned they'd be Houston-bound to play the Houston Cougars Friday night in a regional that also contains Baylor and Texas A&M.

Maybe it was for the best that the Hawkeyes had a long bus ride home from Bloomington, Ind., Sunday following their 13-4 rout of Northwestern in the league's championship game. That got a lot of celebrating out of their system. They didn't get back to Iowa City until after 1 a.m., Monday.

'The first four hours flew by,' Iowa left fielder Chris Whelan said. 'We were as giddy as 13-, 14-year-old kids. No one wanted the bus ride to end.

'Then the adrenaline settled down and it was a normal bus trip for the last three.'

They awakened Monday wondering where their NCAA destination would be. Judging from their reactions as the pairings were announced site by site, it wasn't the 'who' they cared about, it was the 'where.'

They groaned when they didn't get Long Beach, Calif. They were disappointed when it wasn't Stanford, then LSU. They seemed glad it wasn't Hattiesburg, Miss.

Then came the announcement they were headed to Houston, and the Hawkeyes seemed fine with that even though it means having to outlast three Texas teams in Texas.

The main reason: It wouldn't be a bus ride. These guys spend a lot of time in buses in the spring.

Plus, 'At this time of year it doesn't matter who we play,' Heller said. 'It's just a matter of who's playing well and who's not.'

Iowa won four of five games over four days for its first Big Ten tourney title, and you don't do that without playing well. The pitching was above and beyond anything Heller could have wanted. Ryan Erickson, Josh Martsching, Drake Robison, Zach Daniels — the Hawkeyes' season probably would be over were it not for the efforts of all four.

But Heller said it wasn't the best ball his team has played this season because its offense wasn't all it could be.

'Pitching and defense picked us up,' he said, then added if you have those two things you usually can score enough to win.

Still, it was a Hawkeye hitter who was named the tournament's Most Outstanding Player, however, and it was the right selection. Whelan, the sophomore leadoff man from Naperville, Ill., though he went just 1-for-11 over the final three games after homering in the first two.

However, Iowa's performance was about more than numbers. Its effort over those four days was typified by Whelan in Iowa's 7-5, 13-inning, almost-five-hours-long win over Minnesota Saturday night.

In the seventh inning of a 5-5 game, Whelan was hit in the face by a pitch. He was on his knees for a couple minutes as the crowd was silent. It looked like it might be bad. Somehow, it wasn't.

'I got pretty lucky,' Whelan said. 'The ball hit my helmet and then my nose. I was bleeding pretty good.'

A trainer put some cotton is one of his nostrils, and he continued playing.

'I didn't know what else to do,' Whelan said, 'so I ran to first base.' He may have been the only person in the ballpark or the television audience who wasn't surprised he remained in the game.

On Whelan's next at-bat, a pitch came perilously close to hitting him again. He didn't appear to even flinch.

'I've never been one to shy away from getting hit by pitches,' he said. 'I try to get on base any way I can. If it's getting hit in the shoulder, the head, so be it. I'm a guy who crowds the plate.'

In the 10th inning in a game filled with masterful defensive plays, Whelan made the topper. Before he slid into the wall that juts out in the Indiana stadium's foul territory on the left field side, he caught a fly just before it hit the ground.

If you aren't scared of getting back in a batter's box after getting hit in the face by a pitch, what's to fear from a wall?

'It's probably the best catch I've made in my life,' Whelan said. 'The wall kind of came from nowhere. I had to slide and dive a little bit. I think everybody was willing to throw it all out there.'

That was the story of this tourney for the champions. Pitchers threw more pitches than they'd ever thrown in a game all season. Catches that shouldn't have been made were made. Unlike Maryland and Nebraska, which Iowa beat in the tourney, the Hawkeyes couldn't lose and then proceed to the NCAAs. That ratcheted up the tension and the importance of each pitch.

'We've got to get to the point where we don't have to win the tournament (to go to the NCAAs),' Heller said.

But they did this year, and it turned out to be one of the most-memorable weekends in the history of the program. The reward is more baseball, in the biggest college tournament. And, mercifully, an airplane trip.