Iowa Hawkeyes baseball team loses meaningless Big Ten tournament game to Indiana

CEDAR RAPIDS — Little juice in the game, zero significance to it, no fans watching it.

Iowa’s baseball team lost late Thursday night to Indiana, 5-0, in the Big Ten Conference tournament at Charles Schwab Field in Omaha, Neb. But who cares?

It meant nothing. At least to the Hawkeyes.

Iowa’s spot in Saturday’s semifinals was assured with a win Wednesday night over Rutgers. Pool play, four of them with three teams in each, the highest-seeded team winning the tiebreaker to advance ... welcome to the Big Ten tournament in 2025.

The Hawkeyes (33-21-1) will play UCLA (41-15) at 6 p.m. Saturday. Iowa is the third seed overall in the tourney and UCLA, also a pool winner, is second seeded.

Penn State (33-22) also has clinched a semifinal spot, upsetting fourth-seeded USC on Thursday after beating fifth-seeded Washington on Wednesday to win its pool. The Nittany Lions are seeded ninth overall.

The final pool winner comes down to Friday’s game between top-seeded Oregon and eighth-seeded Nebraska.

Iowa used 15 position players/designated hitters Thursday night and six pitchers. The Hawkeyes finished with just five hits, two from Caleb Wulf.

Ben DeTaeye got the pitching start for Iowa, giving up three runs in 2 1/3 innings to take the loss. The Hawkeyes are leaving normal weekend starters Aaron Savary and Reece Beuter for the rest of the tournament.

“DeTaeye gave us a good start,“ Iowa Coach Rick Heller said. ”He was really good the first two innings, and his pitch count was down, so we decided to go a third inning. He strikes out the first guy, then he walks two to get to (Devin) Taylor and first pitch he hits a home run and we are down three runs on one hit.“

Cole Gilley threw six four-hit innings for his 10th win this season for Indiana. Ben Grable threw three relief innings, giving up just one hit.

Taylor went 3-for-4 with that aforementioned three-run home run for the Hoosiers (33-24).

“Offensively, we knew it was going to be a challenging night with Gilley and Grable both able to throw,“ Iowa Coach Rick Heller said. ”Gilley gave us a chance in the first to jump out on top with the bases loaded. We had an opportunity with a runner on third and less than two outs, and we didn’t get him home. We hit a lot of fly balls, which is pretty uncharacteristic for this team, and it led to a lot of 1-2-3 innings.“

Comments: jeff.johnson@thegazette.com