2/12/2020 baseball Edit

Indiana anticipates growth with the expectation to win in 2020

Taylor Lehman • TheHoosier

Staff

After losing much of the meat on his 2019 roster, second-year Indiana head coach Jeff Mercer is leaning on his older players to bring the wealth of youth along, as the Hoosiers prepare to defend a Big Ten regular season title.

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When Indiana takes the field Friday at LSU, it will look like a drastically different team than the group that Jeff Mercer led to a regular season Big Ten title during his first year as head coach in 2019.

Staples from the final years of the program Chris Lemonis left behind – Matt Lloyd, Matt Gorksi, Scotty Bradley, Ryan Fineman, etc. – have moved on from the program, whether it be through graduation, the MLB draft or, in Justin Walker’s case, transfer. Five starters from Mercer’s first season are no longer on the roster, along with Logan Kaletha and Wyatt Cross off the bench, and along with those departures went 55 of Indiana’s Big Ten-leading 90 home runs last season. Mercer’s entire starting pitching rotation was lost as well.

Left to fill those gaps are 23 underclassmen, on a 37-man roster.

“Nobody’s going to put an asterisk next to the game and say, ‘Well, you played a bunch of freshmen and sophomores,’” Mercer said. “No one’s going to say, ‘Well, you guys didn’t have the experience. We’ll spot you three runs.’ It doesn’t work like that. If we give those guys an excuse, then they have one. We’ve got to be ready to go from the beginning.”

By “ready to go,” Mercer said he means being ready to identify where the team is weak and begin to make improvements after the first weekend against the No. 11 team in the country, making strides toward its own most-perfect form before the last month of the season.

There are areas of obvious weakness simply in the fact that there will be new faces, such as a new starting rotation that will most likely include junior lefty Tommy Sommer and sophomore Gabe Bierman but still has the back-third open, or at catcher, where transfer Collin Hopkins – brother of Purdue tight end Brycen Hopkins – junior Hunter Combs, freshman Brant Voth and even Drew Ashley will look to replace Ryan Fineman.

The Hoosiers return Elijah Dunham, who boasted the fourth-best slugging percentage on the team last year and was drafted in the 40th round by the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Cole Barr, who tied a team-high 17 home runs, was second with 51 RBIs and 14 doubles and was drafted by the Seattle Mariners in the 37th round. Players like Duham, Barr, senior shortstop Jeremy Houston and senior pitcher Cal Krueger, must bring the young Hoosiers along, Mercer said, to continue what 2019 started. Otherwise, there will be gaps in momentum for the program.

“Teach young guys how to work,” Mercer said. “Teach them the expectation – what to value what not to value. The outcome takes care of itself. Learn from a guy like Matt Lloyd and pay it forward. That’s how you create a legacy or a culture.”

By nature, college baseball has plenty of turnover at the highest levels, so developing an identity around the players on the roster isn’t anything new to Mercer or the coaching staff. Where 2019 was a year with plenty of power hitting, 2020 will likely feature more dynamics on the basepaths – stealing bases, squeezing out another base on balls hit into holes and other small-ball techniques.

On the mound, Mercer said his pitchers are young but have good stuff, ranging from 90-94 miles per hour with plenty of movement but in a raw way that young pitchers tend to wield those abilities.

It’s a team that will need to take the “slam dunks” and “lay-ups,” as Mercer puts it to his players, and, undoubtedly, there will be growth.

“Your best laid plans often go awry, so I’m sure we have all these great plans and I’m sure they’ll all go to hell, so we’ll have to figure it out along the way,” Mercer said. “It’s fun to come in with a group of guys who have had success and have an expectation of winning. To be able to build off of that is a great challenge.”

Houston, in the final year of a career that has seen its ups and downs, has seen where D1Baseball.com and Baseball America have slotted the Hoosiers in the Big Ten by the end of 2020, he said. Fourth place, falling below Michigan, who they’d edged out for the regular season title last season.

Obviously, he said he doesn’t agree and feels the team has entered the season with a chip on its shoulder behind its second-year manager, ready to give Indiana fans something to watch in 2020. And Mercer isn’t holding his guys back either.

“Those guys are a really competitive group,” Mercer said. “They’re also very aware. I try to get out of the way and let those guys do what they do. (Houston is) not blind to it and the rest of the guys aren’t either. You feel like they’ve earned the right to have confidence and have belief. I certainly am not going to be the one to tell them that they shouldn’t.”