Ducks splash cold water on potential Iowa Big Ten baseball championship

IOWA CITY — The Big Ten baseball championship trophy was at Duane Banks Field Saturday along with championship caps and T-shirts for the players.

All the Iowa baseball team had to do to claim those spoils was beat Oregon Saturday. Or Friday. Or Thursday.

Uh, no. Other than when they had a short-lived 6-2 lead Friday, the Hawkeyes were as far from defeating the Ducks than they were from Eugene itself. The scores were 10-0, 9-6, and Saturday’s 13-4. Iowa went from 21-6 and alone in first place in the Big Ten standings to 21-9 and a game behind Oregon.

UCLA defeated Northwestern in Los Angeles later Saturday to tie the Ducks for first.

The Hawkeyes’ first Big Ten regular-season title in 35 years was tantalizingly close. Then they played the games.

Oregon looked like how the fifth-ranked team in the nation is supposed to look. Good pitching, good hitting, good defense. With the wind blowing strongly to right field all three games, the Ducks hit 11 home runs.

Five came Saturday. Hawkeye right fielder Kellen Strohmeyer got some good cardio in, leaping time after time for balls that sailed over his reach and the fence.

Oregon has 107 home runs. Duck outfielder Mason Neville has 26 to lead the nation. Get this: Neville went 1-for-16 in the series without a homer and struck out nine times. It mattered not a bit.

Carter Garate, the team’s No. 9 hitter, homered twice and knocked in five runs Saturday, two days after he hit a grand slam. He arrived in Iowa City with one dinger all season.

“I was working on some stuff while we got here and then it just showed up in the games,” Garate said.

Iowa had lost just two Big Ten home games all season. Then Oregon just showed up.

The Big Ten used to be a really mediocre baseball league by Division I power-conference standards. Last year’s College World Series had four ACC teams, four SEC teams.

Getting four Pac-12 refugees has altered that. They form four-fifths of the league’s top five in the standings. Iowa is in the middle of the five, having dominated its old Big Ten brothers before going 1-5 against Washington and Oregon this month.

It’s a different baseball conference now, and the league tournament in Omaha in the week ahead figures to be a Pacific coast clambake. The first of many, probably.

For Iowa, 21-9 is a heck of a Big Ten record. It hurts, however, when it had been 21-6 and the championship caps, T-shirts and trophy were in its stadium waiting to see if the Hawkeyes could squeeze out one more victory.

“These guys kind of pulled it off,” Iowa Coach Rick Heller said. “They pulled off a miracle but they didn’t finish it.

“You’re picked ninth and turned over the whole lineup, and (had) seven guys in the draft. To find a way to be playing for a conference-championship on the last day of the regular-season with what we have in aid and nobody raising money for us for NIL, and playing teams that have a whole lot of money …”

The season isn’t over. No. 3-seed Iowa will go into a pool with the Nos. 6 and 10 seeds (Indiana and Rutgers) from the “old” Big Ten and try to win its way into the semifinals. Then, maybe all those Oregon fly balls that became windblown home runs here will be long outs in Charles Schwab Field Omaha and the Hawkeyes make a run at the league’s automatic NCAA tournament berth.

Or, more likely, a lot of foul balls will rattle around empty seats in the 24,000-seat stadium as teams from over 1,500 miles away battle in the championship game.

So, how does Iowa continue to compete in a bigger, better Big Ten that includes some warm-weather programs without cash flow problems?

“Just keep doing what we’re doing,” Heller said, “which is the best we can with what we have. Try to develop kids and coach them up and get them to play harder, and that’s what we’ve done here for 12 years.

“And this team probably has done as good a job as any.”

That championship swag was so close to the Hawkeyes. But off in the wind it flew away, like all those Oregon home runs hit here.

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