The Hoosiers were on a roll and no one was going to stop them, not even the Gophers, who were pretty hot themselves. They won the Big Ten Tournament championship by defeating the red hot Minnesota Golden Gophers 13-2.
This is Indiana’s first Tourney title in in 13 years. This Hoosier team did it with awesome offense and intimidating pitching and won each game of the tournament embarrassingly large margins. For the tourney, they scored 11.75 runs/game. On the other hand, their pitching gave up an average of 2 runs a game. TWO RUNS A GAME! Considering that an average of 17.1 runs/game were scored by both teams for the tournament, that’s quite a feat.
So if Big Ten fans were coming for slugfests, they probably weren’t disappointed. The 9-1 drubbing by Indiana of Purdue on the first day was the lowest scoring affair of the Tournament by any of the teams.
Illinois can take heart that in the first game, they scored more in game than any other team in the 2009 Tournament. That was the game against Michigan State when down by 4 runs due to an Eric Roof grand slam, they came back with 16 runs. No team had scored more.
And then there’s Pete Cappetta…
As I predicted yesterday, Cappetta (above) was named to the Big Ten All-Tournament Team. Pete was the lone player not on Indiana, Minnesota, or Ohio State who got the honor. He certainly deserved it. Cappetta continued his hot hitting from the regular season and hit like crazy. He went 7 for 11 with five rbis and five runs plus three doubles and a triple.
Congratulations Pete!
Unfortunately, the news that the Hoosiers have won it all is bad news for the Illini. With Indiana getting an automatic bid to the NCAA Regionals, that lessens the chance that the committee will be picking Illinois to be in the chosen 64. We’ll find out for sure Monday morning
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