Will the real Nebraska baseball team please step up? Is it the team that took two-out-of-three against then-fifth-ranked Oregon State over the weekend? Or the team that dropped games to Creighton (9-5 Tuesday at Haymarket Park) and Omaha (11-9 at Tal Anderson Field in Omaha) Wednesday?
No disrespect to Creighton or Omaha, but Husker fans thought Nebraska had built momentum going into the two mid-week games before Rutgers comes to Haymarket Park this weekend. The series is the Huskers’ fourth-of-10 in conference play. Three of the final six also are at home.
The first Rutgers game is slated for 6 p.m. CDT Friday and will be televised by Nebraska Public Media. The Scarlet Knights are 14-15, including 4-5 in the Big Ten. They’ve won three in a row. Nebraska dropped to 12-17 this week, and the Huskers are 2-7 in the conference, tied for last.
Minnesota and Ohio State are also 2-7. Nebraska plays Minnesota at Haymarket Park in early May. The Huskers don’t play Ohio State in the regular season.
This is a Nebraska team that looked like a potential NCAA Regional host going into the season. Now it needs to step up significantly in order to earn a place in postseason play.
Rutgers is hitting .269 as a team, led by Trevor Cohen, who’s hitting .350 with a home run and 15 runs-batted-in. Ty Doucette is hitting .291 and leading the team with five home runs and 23 RBIs. Freshman right-hander Landon Mack is 3-2 with a 3.15 earned-run-average.
Mack and redshirt-freshman right-hander Justin Shadek have started seven games each, tops on the team. Shadek is 0-3 with a 6.91 ERA. Nebraska can expect to see them.
Rutgers’ team ERA is 5.33.
The Husker weekend rotation has included Will Walsh, Ty Horn and Jackson Brockett. Walsh has stepped up as the Friday-night starter, after beginning the season starting on Sunday. That was before Mason McConnaughey went down with a season-ending injury.
Horn pitched the eighth inning Wednesday night, facing three batters, striking out two.
Horn was the eighth pitcher Nebraska used, while Omaha used 10. He and Blake Encarnacion were the only Husker pitchers who didn’t walk a batter. Encarnacion faced just one.
The Husker pitchers walked 12 — count ‘em, 12 — and hit three batters. The free bases proved to be Nebraska’s undoing. A five-run fourth gave Nebraska a 9-4 lead, but the Mavericks responded with four runs in the fifth. The Huskers couldn’t score again. In the seventh, Omaha’s Drew Borner hit a two-out, two-run home run for the victory. The runner on base had walked with two outs.
Max Buettenback hit a home run and drove in five runs for the Huskers.
Omaha scored two runs in the first, aided by three hit batters and a walk. Two of the hit batters came with the bases loaded. Buettenback hit his home run, with two on, in the second. It appeared the Huskers were on the way to recovering the Oregon State momentum after the Creighton loss.
They did not.
