Iowa Hawkeyes begin baseball season next weekend with very inexperienced pitching staff

IOWA CITY - Connie Mack always used to say baseball is 75 percent pitching. If you don’t know who Connie Mack is, and you probably don’t, Google him.

But regardless if you believe in the adage or not, there’s no debate that pitching plays a huge part in a team’s success. Or failure.

Which means the Iowa Hawkeyes this 2026 season will be ...? No one really knows.

Iowa lost 434 innings and 54 of its 56 starts from last season’s team to graduation and/or pro ball. It also saw pitching coach Sean Kenny leave for the University of Arizona.

Yowza!

“This team from the position player side, I think all of us have a pretty good feel for where we should be. That’s defensively, offensively with the returners that we have,” said Iowa Coach Rick Heller at Thursday afternoon’s team media day. “But the pitching staff is just the opposite. All the major roles are going to be new guys to those roles.”

This is Heller’s 13th season leading the program, and he always has seemed to have at least one starting pitcher or key reliever or two returning. Until now.

“The first time that’s happened, really, for us,” Heller said. “Usually there has been one or two guys that you can hang your hat on from an experience standpoint. Someone who has been out there with the lights on before. I think the only way we are going to find out where we are is to go play and try and figure out roles and where we are going to use certain guys.”

Iowa begins the season next weekend in suburban Phoenix with three games as part of the MLB Desert Invitational. The Hawkeyes play Kansas State on Friday, Feb. 13, then Air Force the following night and Northeastern the day after that.

MLB Network will televise the Kansas State and Northeastern games. Iowa’s home opener at Banks Field is scheduled (tentatively, of course, with Iowa spring weather) for Feb. 24 against Wartburg.

Iowa went 33-22-1 a season ago, finishing third in the Big Ten Conference. But a 2-10-1 finish to the season, including dropping two of three games in the conference tournament kept it out of the NCAA tournament.

Now all of the pitchers have left. Among them were starter Cade Obermueller who was drafted by the Philadelphia Phillies in the second round, and starter Aaron Savary, who was drafted in the 13th round by the Cleveland Guardians.

Reliever Daniel Wright went to the Chicago White Sox in the 10th round. Reliever Anthony Watts was selected by the 14th round by the St. Louis Cardinals.

Heller said Iowa will go with sophomore right-hander Tyler Guerin and graduate student Logan Runde, a righty, as starters next week. The starter in the third game in Arizona is uncertain and depends on Iowa’s bullpen usage in its first two games.

Runde is a transfer from Florida International and joins reliever Joe Husak (Illinois State) as significant portal additions.

Former Cedar Rapids Prairie prep Maddux Frese was among those Heller mentioned as likely finding a role somewhere. The son of former Hawkeye Nate Frese is a transfer from Southeastern Community College in Burlington.

The rest of the staff is almost solely made up of freshmen and redshirt freshmen.

“These guys are great athletes,” said first-year pitching coach Wes Obermueller, the former major leaguer elevated from his player development coach role to replace Kenny. “These guys have a lot of confidence coming from where they’ve played and they’ve pitched, and how you pitch pretty much all year around anymore. They all know their stuff. It’s just a matter of fine tuning everything.”

Iowa does return its two leading hitters from last season in infielders Gable Mitchell and Caleb Wulf, as well as fellow position player regulars Miles Risley, Jaixen Frost and Kooper Schulte. Second baseman Mitchell, a senior, has played in 143 games in his successful career and is a probably MLB draft pick.

“Next week hopefully everybody is ready to go. That’d be great,” Mitchell said. “But if there are some nerves, from young guys especially, you just be there for them. Help them understand what it was like when I was going through it. Just help them finish the year.”

“It’s different being our senior year,” Wulf said. “But I think the standard stays the same. All we’ve got to do is go out and trust in our practice. Just be ourselves each and every day.”

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