Originally posted by HemiHawk:
Frustrating. Must be just a lack of focus or something. I don't know a lot about college baseball, how good are these teams? Bradley, WIU, and Milwaukee?
Bradley is having one of their best starts in school history, they are 17-7 with a top 25 RPI (we play again next week)
Western Illinois is awful with a plus 200 RPI and like 8-17 overall (we play them again as well)
UW-Milwaukee is interesting as they are at 78 in RPI after beating Iowa, they are like 16-9, they swept a really good Missouri team on a weekend, but have some bad loses as well.
To paint a picture for you, Iowa was in the top 20 RPI wise before WIU. They lost to WIU fall into the mid 20's, they lost to UWM and now sit at 36. So one or two of these loses will not hurt you, but they add up and kill you.
Midweek games are a different beast as you don't throw your best guys, but we seem to hit worse in these midweek games then we do against the like of Indiana. So that is frustrating. Iowa needs two or three go to midweek guys and we seem to lack that. We go Johnny Wholestaff and it's a crap shoot. We have a couple guys like Tyler Radtke who were very good last year, this year he cannot get an out and gives up A LOT of free bases.
Iowa has some great chances left with Maryland who is top 15 RPI (3 games), Nebraska top 20 (3 games), Michigan who is top 50 and a midweek vs BRadley left as well. However, we have a lot of 100+ RPI's left. So the margin of error is becoming thinner in these midweek games. It will be very tough for Iowa to win the Maryland and NEbraska series IMO with our hitting. I hope I am wrong, but we shall see.
