From day one, the thought of success for the 2025 Indiana baseball season always came down to playing complementary ball.
The Hoosier batting order is loaded with home run power, pristine situational awareness and simply players you want in high leverage. Indiana has a College World Series-level offense spearheaded by a MLB Draft first round projectee Devin Taylor and other stupendous returnee hitters such as Joey Brenczewski, Tyler Cerny and Andrew Wiggins to name a few.
Coming into Tuesday’s 13-0 win over Bellarmine, Indiana had outhit its opponents .302 to .259.
But once the Hoosiers run out of chances in the offensive half of their innings, it has sometimes been pitching chaos, and not in a good way. Head coach Jeff Mercer’s pitching staff was riding a 5.66 earned run average heading into the matchup with the Knights on Tuesday.
But before Big Ten play gets fully underway, Indiana needs to get some momentum going on the bump, and it did that against Bellarmine. A bullpen day saw seven pitchers throw and all were good enough to write home about, allowing three hits — two of them coming after the Hoosiers had sent home their 13 runs against the Knights. It was one of the best performances for Hoosier pitching this season.
Cole Gilley got the start for Indiana, and thanks to five Hoosiers first inning runs, he got the win. Gilley and the other six Hoosiers pitchers faced 26 batters en route to seven strikeouts, Ryan Rushing had three in his lone inning. As well as the aforementioned three hits, only.
“As a staff, we wanted to do our job today, one inning at a time and pass the baton off to the next guy and just fill it back up,” pitcher Grant Holderfield said. Holderfield was one of three IU pitchers to face the minimum three batters in his inning. “I think we did a really good job of commanding the zone and getting outs.”
Indiana needs games like this in spots like this — a mid week game against a non-conference opponent before a huge Big Ten series against the USC Trojans. Weeks like this allow struggling players to cut their teeth against beatable competition. It seems as if baseball is the only sport where that is done regularly.
Mercer said postgame that games like this are very much part of the development of the talent in his program.
“We can practice all day long, but it’s not the same as getting out there and doing it in real time,” Mercer said. “You should be able to go get your three outs before they score three runs, and we should be able to get a bunch of different guys in the game.”
These pitchers have Division 1 stuff and they are in Bloomington for a reason. Games like Tuesday’s are the testing period and games to be played Friday, Saturday and Sunday. During the USC series is where these seasons get turned around. We’ll have to wait and see how these pitchers capitalize on this opportunity.
