HL Tournament

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Apparently the Administrator has blocked out the Baseball page for posts from everyone except yours truly.

Anyway, I pick Milwaukee to take the Horizon League Championship as the #2 seed.

Although it would be poetic justice for UIC (#3 seed) to beat Wright State (#1 seed) as payback for last year, I don't see it happening. When was the last time that the team with the worst pitching staff in the tournament beat the team that leads the league in virtually all hitting categories?

UIC wins one game before being eliminated.

Regarding next year's recruiting class: only 1 1/2 of the 7 recruits for next year are pitchers (one guy is a combo). Coach Dee said that they are not done yet--let's hope that he gets a few more pitchers or next year will be worse than this year.

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UIC has been eliminated , as expected.

Several things were unexpected.

A very uncharacteristically effective pitching performance in the first 3 games of the Tournament. After trudging through the season with the 2nd worst team ERA in the HL and giving up 10 or more runs in almost half our games, the ERA for the first 3 games of the tourney was a brilliant 1.67, mainly from superior starts from Riegler, Kovacevich, and Wyman.

The stinker didn't come until the last game, from our (supposedly) BEST pitcher, Michael Heesch, who gave up 6 runs in the first 2 innings.

It makes no difference now, in retrospect, but I thought it curious that Coach Dee would not use his ace (Heesch) until the 4th game--UIC was facing elimination after the first game. They very easily could have been eliminated from the tourney with their best pitcher not getting a start. This happened 2 years ago, when a similar strategy was used. I don't see how you can look ahead 2 or 3 games when you can be eliminated the next game. I feel a better strategy would have been to start Heesch in the first game and bring him back later on short rest if we advanced that far.

A bright spot for next year: we might have found ourselves a closer in double-duty Jason Ganek, who looked surprisingly good in the 8 games that he pitched, in addition to his play at 3B.