Wrapping Up the Big Ten Baseball Tournament

The Big Ten baseball tournament has been a dandy, and today it finally winds down! There have been some very, very late nights, made more aggravating by the Big Ten Network’s talent thinking they are very, very clever by dubbing it “Big Ten After Dark” and then repeating the phrase approximately fifteen times a minute during broadcasts.

No, I’m not annoyed, why? It’s super clever.

Anyway, it’s not dark in Omaha today. It’s gorgeous, sunny, and 70 degrees—perfect baseball weather. So what’s on the ticket today? You can watch both of these on BTN.

Ohio State (7) vs. Minnesota (4) - Loser’s Bracket (Right Now)

As I write this, it’s the top of the 4th, and it’s a 0-0 tie. Literally 30 seconds after typing that, Ohio State’s Brady Cherry launched a two-run homer. So now it’s 2-0.

Nebraska (5) vs. Winner of Above - Championship Game (3 pm CT)

Not much to preview here since it’s not known who Nebraska will be facing. But what we do know is that based on yesterday, literally anything can happen for the Huskers. Will it be the team that lost 18-8 while committing a smorgasbord of errors? Or the team that shut down the Wolverines in the night cap? We shall soon find out.

Missed action earlier this week? Here’s how your team fared:

A few notable happenings:

• On the first day of the tournament, the lower-seeded team won in every single game. Some of these weren’t terribly surprising—#5 Nebraska beating #4 Minnesota wasn’t that unbelievable—but it it rare that it would happen in all four games.
• Nebraska 10-run ruled Iowa in the second round. It’s not really that important, I just wanted to point it out.
• Nebraska and Michigan played twice yesterday (for the fourth and fifth time in about two weeks!) The first game went very badly for the Huskers, who managed to give up an astonishing 7 runs in the top of the first. Yikes. They did make back those runs finishing with 8... but the bad news is that Michigan finished with 18. Nebraska also contributed six errors. “It was almost so bad the first game you could almost laugh about it a little bit,” Nebraska coach Darin Erstad said. I guess that’s one reaction.

• The other possible reaction though was to get their shit together, and happily, that’s what the Huskers chose to do. They showed great resilience in moving past the first game, beating Michigan in that night’s recap 7-4 and moving on to their third B1G Championship Game since joining the conference.
• While getting their asses kicked, the Huskers did do something interesting—namely, they hit back-to-back home runs, which is only the second time such a thing has ever happened in TD Ameritrade Park.