Friday, April 18, 2008

Week Four Friday Night

For all the naysayers that claim nobody cares about baseball across the Big Ten, a fair amount of people showed up at the three contests that were played this evening. No, they weren't football-sized crowds, but they did fill the ballparks up. I would dare say that all three venues attracted more fans than some traditional west coast powers muster at home. Hats off to the fans in Columbus, State College and Ann Arbor.

Purdue 7 Ohio State 4 (box)
Ryne White goes 4 for 4 with two homers, three runs scored and three RBI to lead the Boilers to a road victory. Brandon Haveman collected three hits and Dan Black drove in two. OSU's Dan Burkhart had a pair of hits, scored once and drove in one run.

Matt Bischoff posted his second win. Josh Lindblom recorded his eighth save by striking out four of the six batters he faced.

3,093 showed up in Columbus for the battle between the second and third place teams in the Big Ten.

Penn State 7 Indiana 3 (box)
Ryan Stobart (2-2) works 7.1 innings allowing all three IU runs and picks up the win. Drew O'Neil came on to post his seventh save of the year. Rick Marlin led the PSU bats with three RBI. Brian Ernst had two hits and scored twice. IU's Josh Phegley had two hits and drove in two.

2,596 were in attendance at State College.

Michigan 8 Michigan State 3 (box)
A standing room only crowd of 2,814 saw Zach Putnam toss seven innings of four-hit baseball to lead Michigan to the win. Putnam improved to 4-0 and didn't allow an earned run while fanning five and walking two. Leif Mahler had three hits and two RBI to lead the offense. Jason Christian and Kenny Fellows both drove in a pair of runs, as well. Adam Abraham homered for the Wolverines.

Chris Roberts had two hits, scored twice and drove in one for MSU. Kyle Day also collected a pair of hits and had one RBI.

The other two contests -- Illinois at Minnesota and Northwestern at Iowa -- were postponed by rain.

Michigan remains atop the conference at 12-1. Purdue still holds down second place at 10-3. In spite of losing, Ohio State is still in third at 7-5. The rained out Illini are fourth at 6-6. Minnesota and Northwestern are next at 5-7. Penn State moves up to 5-8.

Iowa is at 4-8. Losing today dropped both Indiana and Michigan State to 4-9.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Did you hear about Ryan LaMarre at all? He's my son's new favorite (the kid chooses by number, and so far has done well with LaMarre and Zach Putnam).