Hoosiers aim for second title of season

On May 19, the IU baseball team won its fifth Big Ten regular season championship. This weekend it will try to win its third Big Ten Tournament title.

The team has never won both championships in the same season. It won the tournament in 1996 and 2009, but hadn’t won the regular season title since 1949.

IU will take on Minnesota at 8:05 ET May 23 at Target Field in Minneapolis in the Big Ten Tournament. The Hoosiers, the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament, have a bye and will play the lowest remaining seed that advances.

“The No. 1 seed, the biggest part about it is having a bye and getting to save your pitching so that, hopefully, best-case scenario, you win three games, you get to use all of your weekend starters and you don’t have to go into your other starters that much, which is a big advantage,” senior shortstop Michael Basil said. “Getting the one or two-seed is huge for the reason of the bye, but the one-seed, meaning you won the Big Ten regular season is the best feeling about it.”

After having clinched the regular season title and remaining in the national rankings for most of the season, IU Coach Tracy Smith said he remains confident in the team’s chances of receiving an at-large bid. He said this allows his team the chance to play relaxed baseball, the brand of baseball he believes his team plays best.

“I remember the streak that we put together in the middle of the season, the 18-game winning streak, it was like the guys didn’t think about it, didn’t talk about it,” he said. “They’d show up to the park every day just kind of casually going about their business, and the next thing you know, you rip off 18 straight. It’s like anything else. I think sometimes the harder you try, the more it inhibits your performance. I think this team, when they’re relaxed, actually play their best baseball.”

In last weekend’s series at Ohio State, Smith said the team felt pressure to perform. He said he believes that is the reason behind the 2-1 defeat May 16  in Columbus, Ohio, and the team being unable to plate any runs until the ninth inning May 17, when it came back to tie the game at 2 before winning it in the 10th to capture a share of the crown.

“I think you look at our play on Friday night, and we were very tense. I don’t want to say for whatever reason, I think guys knew the historical perspective of what they could accomplish had yet to be accomplished,” Smith said. “I think once we got that piece of that championship out of the way so we could stop hearing about all the regular season and all that stuff, I think you saw us come out relaxed on that last day and play Indiana baseball.”

Basil was no small part of that run.

On Friday, Basil ripped a double in the top of the ninth that scored the first run for the Hoosiers. He then stole third, and scored the game-tying run on a sacrifice fly. In the 10th, he laid down the sacrifice squeeze bunt to give the Hoosiers a 3-2 advantage.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a performance from a kid who just flat-out literally put a team on his (back), and not hitting a three-run homer to do it, but just the will, the determination that he would show in his face, his actions in the dugout, his words in the dugout and then what he did out on the field of stealing third, getting the big double and all that,” Smith said. “That kid single-handedly put the team on his back to win that second game at Ohio State. I honestly in my heart of hearts feel that if we didn’t have Michael Basil that series, we would not be talking about all this cool stuff and outright championships. That dude made it happen.”

Smith said that pending matchups, either sophomore Aaron Slegers or junior Joey DeNato will start the first game for the Hoosiers. Both have been prepared. He also added that the team will not throw pitchers on short rest in the tournament.

“You probably fear more the pitching matchup than you do the offensive matchup because I don’t care who we’re throwing against,” Smith said. “Our guys are going to, I think, do a good job of keeping it a game.”