Iowa Hawkeyes eliminated from Big Ten baseball tournament via blowout loss to Michigan

The end of the road for the Iowa Hawkeyes at the Big Ten Conference Baseball Tournament came suddenly. And harshly.

Michigan scored twice in the top of the first inning then used a nine spot in the seventh to eliminate Iowa with a 13-1, seven-inning win Sunday afternoon at Charles Schwab Field in Omaha, Neb.

The Hawkeyes (36-19) went 3-2 at the tournament and await their postseason fate. NCAA regional pairings will be released Monday.

Iowa has an official 57 RPI, according to the NCAA, which may not be good enough to get it in. In fact, Michigan’s win later Sunday over Rutgers in the Big Ten championship game might end up sealing the Hawkeyes’ fate.

Michigan is 32-26 overall. Certainly Rutgers and Maryland have secured regional spots.

Those might be the three.

“If we don’t get into the tournament, it’s a travesty,” Iowa Coach Rick Heller said. “If anybody deserves to get into the tournament, it’s us. Our resume is as strong as anybody out there. We win the last six series in the Big Ten. We swept Indiana in the last series, we won three games in the conference tournament. We win eight out of nine series, all of them on the road in the Big Ten. Twenty wins in Big Ten play this season.”

Heller continued, doing a good impersonation of a lawyer trying to make his case.

“A win over Air Force and a pitcher who lost only one game. They just won their conference tournament. Wins over Western Michigan, wins over Ball State, wins over Texas Tech. Wins over UC-Irvine, San Diego State on the road, Washington State. We really played a tough schedule.

“Tough losses, close losses to really good teams early on as well. Once we got as healthy as we could this year, we got rolling. This team since mid-March has played as good as any team in the country, really. Our pitching staff is one of the best in the entire country. You can’t deny that. This pitching staff in a regional is somebody nobody wants to face.”

So there you go.

What hurts Iowa is losing its first Big Ten tourney game to an under-.500 Penn State team. In fact, the highest-seeded team in the tournament it played was the 5 (Michigan), and that was a split.

Iowa split two games with sixth-seeded Penn State and beat seventh-seeded Purdue. The conference, as a whole, wasn’t considered especially strong this season. Iowa lost an early season game to Division III Loras, which surely can’t help its case.

But Heller is holding out hope.

“The RPI is wrong sometimes,” he said. “It just is.”

Hard-throwing freshman Brody Brecht started for Iowa on the mound and took the loss. He went one-third of an inning, giving up a hit, two walks and two runs.

Iowa finished with just five hits against three Michigan pitchers, one of whom didn’t last very long. Reliever Willie Weiss came on to begin the bottom of the fifth but was ejected from the game by umpires just five pitches in after a foreign substance was found on his glove.

Cameron Weston was forced to come on to relieve Weiss and ended up throwing three shutout innings.

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