Stryker Report: Unexpected Dropoff
Nebraska doesn’t have anything close to the baseball team it had last year. Not by a long shot. Last year’s team was mentally tough. This one is not.
Yet it would be wrong to say that coach Will Bolt doesn’t have anything resembling the team he had last season. This year’s model looks quite a bit like the 2021 team, and it has a lot of the same players, but it doesn’t have the heart. Because Bolt is coach, the 2022 Huskers have a certain amount of grittiness, but they’re erratic in the field, and they tend to fall apart in the clutch. Baseball America’s preseason poll voters put a lot of faith in Bolt by naming the Huskers a preseason top 25 team, which we now know was too optimistic.
Cam Chick fields a ball during Friday night's game.
Jordyn Senstock photo / Nebraska Communications
In their defense, the Huskers are young, and they’ve had a lot of health problems on their pitching staff. That combination cannot be controlled by a coach, and it will keep the Huskers out of the postseason this year.
Baseball is a game that can turn on you quickly if you don’t have enough maturity and resiliency to maintain your equilibrium. Right now, the Huskers lack that emotional ballast and are subject to wild mood swings. That’s fatal in a sport like baseball.
It could turn back. Nebraska’s young players can yet grow and improve. Bolt is an excellent coach, and he may yet make something good out of this team, which could stabilize itself and finish in the middle of a weak Big Ten Conference. After they were swept by Rutgers over the weekend of April 8-10, the Huskers were 12-18 with a 4-5 conference record. They’ll face easier tests later in the season, but with hard-luck Friday starter Kyle Perry suffering his second arm injury in three years, a case of nagging arm trouble for Colby Gomes and one of their best freshman pitchers (Bellevue freshman Jaxon Jelkin) leaving the team for unknown reasons, they don’t have enough good pitching to win the postseason tournament.
Rutgers is a good team and could win the conference. It may be a top 25-caliber team; that’s still to be determined. Nebraska showed a lot of toughness and almost beat the Knights in Saturday’s 5-4 loss, but apparently didn’t have much left in the tank, and imploded in a 19-1 embarrassment Sunday.
In the bottom of Sunday’s sixth inning, Nebraska faced its moment of truth and failed to grab it.
The Huskers trailed Rutgers 3-1, when starting pitcher Justin Sinibaldi opened the door for a Nebraska comeback, walking Brice Matthews and then hitting Cam Chick with a pitch. Opportunity was knocking — loudly. The Huskers did not answer. With the tying runs on base and one out, Max Anderson, last year’s Big Ten Freshman of the Year, came to the plate and promptly struck out on three consecutive pitches by relief pitcher Sam Portnoy. Griffin Everitt, who has led the Huskers in most offensive categories this year, followed Anderson to the plate and flied out to center.
Anderson looks a lot like last year’s version of himself, but he’s not playing like it at crunch time, and his lack of production is putting pressure on his team.
In the top of the seventh, the Knights grabbed their opportunity, scoring 10 runs. It was a familiar theme: shaky fielding by the Huskers, followed by multiple home runs by the opposition.
Where the 2021 Husker hitters would have made their opponent pay for its mistakes, their 2022 brethren fritter away the opportunity, time after time. Where last year’s Huskers would make a big pitch or a great defensive play to bail themselves out of a jam, this year’s team misplays challenging-but-playable grounders and fly balls, creating opportunities for its opponent.
Plenty of opportunities to change the narrative lie ahead.