Baseball is a weird sport.
In this game, teams that haven’t won a single game can beat any opponent on any given night. You can outplay a team for eight innings, but might fall if you lose that one inning.
This was the instance when Iowa dropped a tough one to Illinois State on Tuesday night, 6-5.
If a random person looked at that box score, they would assume Illinois State played an amazing game and dominated the Hawkeyes in all facets of the game.
But it was actually the opposite.
Iowa dominated the game. They outhit the Redbirds 10-7, struck out 16 opposing batters, and had zero errors.
“It’s frustrating when you look at the box score,” Heller said. “You know, you outhit a team, you know they had all but two hits in one inning, you punch them out 16 times, and you lose. Baseball is a crazy game sometimes.”
Despite outplaying Illinois State in the final stat sheets, it was one bad inning that ultimately shot the Hawkeyes in the foot.
Entering the fourth inning, Iowa found itself with a 1-0 lead and looked to continue its bid for a shutout performance against a Redbird offensive attack that ranks fourth in run production in the Missouri Valley Conference.
Trotting on the mound for his second straight inning of work was first-year Tyler Guerin. After mowing down Illinois State batters in the frame before, head coach Rick Heller was hoping to push Guerin in pursuit of building more confidence with postseason play looming.
Guerin started the inning on a wobbly note after giving up a two run home run, but left the game with runners on first and second with two outs.
Heller called on typical weekend relief pitcher Chas Wheatly to put out the flames and lead Iowa back to the bottom half of the inning.
Like Guerin, Wheatley didn’t have his best stuff entering the inning. After walking a batter to load up the bases, Wheatley left a change-up up in the zone to Illinois State’s Luke Stulga, immediately putting the Hawkeyes down 6-1.
“Both of those guys are guys you want to put in the game where you want to make sure they weren’t going to hit fly balls,” Heller said when talking about Guerin and Wheatly. “They usually get you ground balls, but just didn’t happen that way tonight.”
While the Iowa offense showed life in the eighth inning to cut the lead to one, the underlying factor in the loss was that strange fourth inning.
NCAA tournament hopes
For the third time this season, and the second instance in two weeks, Iowa falls to yet another midweek opponent.
The latest loss pushes the Hawkeyes’ rating percentage index [RPI] down to 71, an 11-spot drop. With an RPI that is already on the lower side of the spectrum when it comes to teams that typically get at-large bids to the NCAA Tournament, these types of losses only hurt Iowa in the long run.
Though the Hawkeyes still face multiple high RPI opponents in Oregon State and Oregon during the final weeks of the season, the leash just got a little tighter.