By Blake Dowson
As the weather improved throughout the weekend of May 13-15, so too, did the baseball Hawkeyes’ spirits.
After a disheartening 5-1 loss on May 13 at the hands of Michigan State, the wind and rain that delayed the game for more than an hour seemed fitting for the mood head coach Rick Heller and the Hawks.
“There’s not much you can say,” Heller said after the loss, which put the Hawkeyes at 8-11 in the Big Ten. “We’ve just had some bad luck lately. We need somebody to step up.”
That somebody was senior Tyler Peyton, an All-American a season ago who has struggled all year on the mound.
Peyton, who had a 5.80 ERA heading into the May 14 matchup, threw 7 scoreless innings of 3-hit ball, lowering his ERA to 4.42 by the final out.
Iowa won the second game of the series, 3-1, on a day in which the Sun was out but the temperature remained rather low.
The senior had battled nagging injuries this season that did not keep him out of the lineup but did keep him away from the mound at times. But with his start on May 14, in addition to another scoreless seven-inning outing on May 7 against Ohio State, it seems as though he may be back to his All-American self.
“I feel back to normal,” Peyton said after the May 14 game. “I have command of all three pitches, I feel like they’re all there now.”
The offense in the second game started with senior Eric Schenck-Joblinske, who knocked in all 3 runs for Iowa.
Schenck-Joblinske, who had not had very many at-bats against left-handed pitching this season, was slotted in the lineup by Heller to face Spartan starter Joe Mockbee, a big lefty. The move paid off.
He drove in 1 run in the second inning with a single to left. After a Mason McCoy walk in the fourth inning, Schenck-Joblinske stepped to the plate and hit a towering home run through the wind in right field to give the Hawkeyes a 3-0 lead, and they did not relinquish it.
The Hawkeyes moved to 9-11 in the conference after the win, giving them hope that they can make it into the Big Ten Tournament. With four conference games remaining, Heller said, he thought it would take 12 conference wins to get into the tournament.
With a series sweep next weekend at Penn State (currently eighth in the Big Ten) being a tall task, winning the rubber match on May 15 versus Michigan State was all the more important.
On a warm and sunny afternoon on May 15, Hawk senior Calvin Mathews toed the rubber on Senior Day for Iowa and put together arguably his best performance of the season.
The Iowa plan was to get three solid innings from Mathews. He ended up throwing 3.2 scoreless innings, allowing only two Spartans to reach base en route to a 5-1 Iowa victory.
“I was really pleased for Calvin,” Heller said. “It was Senior Day, and he’s been such a vital part of the program these past four years, to see him go out there and have some success his last time on the mound made us all feel really good.”
The Hawkeyes gave Mathews run support right away, scoring 3 in their half of the first inning. Iowa challenged the Michigan State fielders and were aided by three Spartan errors in the inning.
Peyton started the inning with a ground ball behind the bag at third, and the throw by the Spartan third baseman Justin Hovis got by first baseman Jordan Zimmerman, allowing Peyton to advance to second.
Next up, senior Nick Roscetti roped a ball to left field that got by Marty Bechina and rolled all the way to the wall, allowing both Peyton and Roscetti to score.
The Hawkeyes tacked on another run in the inning with a perfectly executed double steal, with McCoy leaving early from first base and senior Joel Booker darting for home before McCoy was tagged out.
McCoy added 2 more runs to the cause in the fifth inning with a sharp single past the drawn-in Spartan infield.
The win on May 15 puts Iowa in a tie for ninth place with Illinois, against which the Hawkeyes hold the tiebreaker thanks to a series win over the Illini early in the season.
Maryland and Penn State sit at seventh and eighth in the conference, both one game ahead of Iowa. The Hawks hold the tiebreaker over Maryland, and they travel to Penn State May 19-21.
That means the Hawkeyes control their destiny. Win two games in Happy Valley, and they are in. It will make for a crazy final weekend of Big Ten baseball.
“[Winning the Michigan State series] was huge,” Roscetti said. “It allows us to control our destiny, so that’s a really big morale booster for us. Hopefully, we can ride this momentum into next weekend.”
Follow @BRDowson for Iowa baseball news, updates, and analysis.
