Hawkeyes grind out a midweek win over UW-Milwaukee
It was far from a pristine midweek win for the Iowa Baseball game. The Hawkeyes teetered and swayed in almost every inning on the mound, but never gave up a big inning to the UW-Milwaukee offense. Although the Panthers scored in five different innings, the Hawkeyes used a couple of clutch hits from players off the bench to close out a 12-6 victory on Tuesday night in Iowa City. It is the fifth-straight win for Rick Heller’s squad heading into a rivalry weekend at Nebraska, but it’s a performance that will not look to duplicate in Lincoln.
“My message was, I would hope we hold ourselves to a little bit higher standards. Yeah, we got the win, we did what we had to do to get the win, but it wasn’t a great game,” said Heller. “It wasn’t a clean game. It was messy on the mound, it was messy defensively and three of the eight innings weren’t very productive offensively. We just need to be better than that and hold ourselves to a little bit higher standard.”
Leading just 7-4 in the bottom of the seventh inning, Ben Wilmes made his way to the plate for a pinch-hit at-bat. Wilmes delivered an RBI single into right field, while Gable Mitchell followed with an RBI double to make it a 9-4 advantage heading into the eighth inning. It seemed like a comfortable lead with just six outs left to get. However, Milwaukee fought back and took advantage of free bases given to them.
Two very uncharacteristic errors from Michael Seegers and a walk loaded the bases for the Panthers. Tyler Bickers drove a two-run single into centerfield and the seemingly comfortable five-run lead was cut to just three. Even more unsettling, Milwaukee was sending their best hitter, Carson Hansen, to the plate representing the tying run.
Luckily for the Hawkeyes, the rally never fully came to fruition for the visitors from the Brew City. Rick Heller called Ben DeTaeye on from the bullpen and he got Hansen to groundout to end the threat. That one at-bat was a microcosm of the entire game for the Iowa pitching staff. They got themselves into plenty of dangerous situations, but never let it bubble over into a big inning. Milwaukee had at least two runners on base in every single inning, but ended up leaving 12 runners on base. A silver lining for a pitching staff that gave up 11 hits and ten free bases.
“They ended up avoind the big inning, which was key tonight,” said Heller. “It wasn’t great across the board. There were a couple of positive innings in there, but for the most part, everybody ran into a little bit of trouble. They found ways to get out of it without too much damage.”
In the bottom of the eighth inning, the Hawkeyes finally got the big blow to put the game out of reach. Blake Guerin entered the game as a defensive replacement for Davis Cop, but came to the plate with runners on the corners and just one out. Guerin stepped up in a big spot and crushed a three-run, no doubt home run into the wind in left field to make it 12-6. The second time in as many innings that a player off the bench delivered a bit hit.
“Put Blake in for defense at that point (in the 7th) and thought we’d look at the matchup when he came up and luckily we went with Blake,” said Heller. “He sent a two-strike pitch into orbit, so that was great to see. Definitely made you breathe a little easier with the situation on the pitching side and how it was going.”
Ben DeTaeye struck out the side in the ninth to close out the game, but not without a little bit of drama. A couple of walks and a single loaded the bases, but DeTaeye struck out Milwaukee leadoff batter Sean Tillmon to record the final out.
“We’ll get better from it and move on, but the message to the team was that we are better than that and we need to play better than that.”
The Hawkeyes jumped on the Panthers early in the game with a four-spot in the bottom of the first inning. They took advantage of the four free bases and a two-run triple from Michael Seegers put Iowa up 4-1 in the first.
RBI singles from Davis Cop in the second inning and Andy Nelson in the third helped the Hawks out to a 7-2 lead. It looked like they may run away with it early, but the offense did not score over the middle three frames. Meanwhile, with the pitching staff struggling to put together clean innings, Milwaukee was able to creep back into the game.
“We were taking advantage of the free bases they were giving us and scored runs in three innings to get a nice lead and then it seemed like we went into cruise control,” said Heller. “There wasn’t a lot of life and there were some bad at-bats and I wasn’t real happy with that…the goal is always to win the last three innings and we were able to do that.”
Andy Nelson led the way offensively with a pair of hits, while Blake Guerin, Michael Seegers and Gable Mitchell each logged multi-RBI games. Raider Tello had his ten-game hitting streak snapped, but reached base four times, with three walks and a hit by pitch. His on-base streak has now reached 27 games.
Up Next, the Hawkeyes will travel west for a rivalry series against the Nebraska Cornhuskers in Lincoln. First pitch on Friday is set for 6:05pm CT on BTN+, but there severe weather is in the forecast.
