On Saturday, Illinois and Ohio State completed their Friday contest that was suspended by rain. Illinois won easily with both teams scoring two additional runs. Final Score 9-4 Illinois.
The win goes to Kevin Manson which makes him 7-1 on the season. Mike Sterk got his third save of the year.
Once things got on to the regularly scheduled program, things sort of fell apart for the Illini.
We could only muster six hits and two runs against starter Dan DeLucia and reliever Eric Best. Meantime, the Buckeyes scored nine runs against us. Ohio State went for the big innings, clustering three runs in the first and six in the sixth inning.
Then came the second game:
Score by Innings R H E -------------------------------------------- Illinois............ 001 07 0 0 - 8 8 3 Ohio State.......... 003 0(10)1 X - 14 16 1
Above is the score by innings for the second game of the doubleheader. I’ll give you three guesses which was was the key inning of the game. I’ll bet you won’t need all three.
I was on Cloud Nine after the top of the fifth when the Illini scored seven to make it 8-3 and seemingly clinched the victory. I was watching on Gametracker and when Mike Stankiewicz was replaced by Ben Reeser after Stanky loaded the bases with two hits and a walk, GT seemed to hang. Either it was a long warmup by Reeser or Gametracker was choking on all the runs the Buckeyes were scoring.
Talk about clustering runs. ugh.
For what it’s worth, three ribbies for Joe Bonadonna.
The last game of the series is this afternoon at 12:05pm.
Go Illini!!
A look at last year’s series
In my preview post for this series, I referenced a game in last year’s series against Ohio State when former Illini SS Shawn Roof was hit four times, a Big Ten record. I shot Shawn an email just asked him about it, asking him about it.
He writes:
About last year, yeah that was funny when I got hit 4 times. I vaguely remember as well, but I remember the last 2 were curveballs in the dirt that barely hit my toe. I doubt there was any bad blood, it was probably just because I stood on top of the plate so much, and most teams tried to pitch me in due to me going to right a lot. I was actually pretty glad they did because I think one at bat I was down 0-2 and the other I was down 1-2, and it gave me a chance to get on base.
Shawn DID break the Big Ten record for HBP so I guess it’s not too surprising.
Shawn is currently batting .327 for the Lakeland Flying Tigers, a Tigers Advanced A ball team in Florida. He also wrote that the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez is currently on rehab in Tampa so his team is looking forward to facing him.
Good luck to Shawn!