The Hoosiers are going on their third weekend of regular season play, and their bats have been rusty through the early part of the season.
IU is ranked second-to-last in the Big Ten in hitting with a team batting average of .230 and leads the conference with 79 strikeouts.
IU Coach Chris Lemonis said that’s too many punch-outs with not enough production in the runs column as the Hoosiers take a 3-4-1 record to Birmingham, Alabama, to play a 3-game weekend series against Samford.
“The home runs come with the strikeouts too, unfortunately,” Lemonis said Tuesday about IU’s conference-leading nine home runs. “We’ve struck out a little too much, but we do have a physical team.”
The first weekend is difficult for all batters, senior outfielder Craig Dedelow said. Dedelow speaks from experience on that after playing three opening weekends in his career.
The Hoosiers posted run totals of zero, five and one in their opening weekend in Surprise, Arizona. In the last three games, IU has scored one, six and two runs.
The Hoosiers are fifth in the league in hits, but they aren’t coming in a timely fashion.
IU recorded zero hits with runners in scoring position in two separate games already this season. One of those was the mid-week loss to Cincinnati on Wednesday.
Dedelow said failure to convert on run-scoring opportunities comes down to the middle of the order — players like him, junior outfielder Logan Sowers, sophomore catcher Ryan Fineman and senior infielder Austin Cangelosi. Fineman, with a .333 batting average, is the only one of those four hitting higher than .200.
“The middle of our order isn’t really clicking right now, but once that gets going it’s going to be pretty scary,” Dedelow said Tuesday. ““We have a really good offense this year.”
While Dedelow only has a .174 batting average, he leads the team in home runs and is tied with freshman catcher Jake Matheny for the lead in RBI, with six.
The senior, along with Fineman, junior outfielder Laren Eustace and freshman shortstop Jeremy Houston, is leading the IU offense statistically. Fineman’s .333 and Eustace’s .320 are ranked 29th and 34th, respectively, in the Big Ten.
But IU isn’t even 10 games into the season yet. Getting a lineup to click takes repetition, Dedelow said. It won’t happen in the first two series.
Plus, the Hoosiers have played one of the toughest crops of teams in the nation so far, including No. 5 Oregon State in the opening series. That means tough pitching, Lemonis said.
“The one thing about us is we have played — the pitchers that we’ve faced are some of the best pitchers in the country at this point,” Lemonis said Tuesday before taking on Cincinnati. “We’ll still play a lot of great pitchers, but I think that’ll help.”
The Samford starting rotation is the weakest rotation IU will have faced this season.
It doesn’t feature a pitcher with an earned run average lower than 4.35, and its ace, senior Mikhali Cazenave, averages five hits and 2.5 runs allowed per game. Cazenave also owns the only win by a Samford starting pitcher.
If there’s a weekend for the middle of IU’s lineup to start clicking, it’s this weekend against Samford.
“We’re making strides every single day,” Dedelow said Tuesday. “We’re going to get a lot better this weekend.”
