Brody Brecht threw pretty well despite an Iowa loss to Michigan in 10 innings Wednesday. But as the Hawkeyes turned their attention to Illinois Thursday morning to stay alive in the Big Ten Tournament, Brecht showcased the looseness of the team.
It was good to see, considering Brecht received a lot of bananas from his teammates in the dugout. No, seriously.
Brecht talked about his outing against the Wolverines but was able to even do some squats while being weighed down by fruit.
“I felt pretty good,” Brecht said during Thursday’s broadcast on BTN. “I thought I had good control on all three pitches, splitter I lost a little early but got it late. But no, I felt pretty good that I had thought I had a lot of things working, thought the slider was doing pretty good. You know obviously one got away from me, but yeah, I felt pretty good out there, I wanted to keep going … but it is what it is.”
Right after the interview, Iowa and Illinois were scoreless through three innings in an elimination game.
Brecht though he did enough for his team yesterday, as he threw 7.1 innings, gave up just four hits, two runs (one earned), issued two walks and struck out 10 batters. However, Michigan got the last laugh with a 3-2 win in extras.
Coming into the tournament, Brecht (4-3, 3.55 ERA) started in 14 games for the Hawkeyes where he logged 71.0 innings pitched where he allowed 28 earned runs compared to 118 strikeouts over that stretch. According to head coach Rick Heller, Brecht’s effort was a major contributor to the Hawkeyes late-season success.
“We tried to be consistent all year,” Heller explained during a mid-game interview on Wednesday. “And then this year we’ve had to deal with some injuries and it took us a while, about five weeks ago to kind of get used to the new lineup and how we had to do things to score runs and the guys adapted and just kept playing hard. And then Brody Brecht really stepped up the last last five weeks of the season and has pitched great.
“We’ve been getting good work out of our bullpen. It took us a while to kind of figure out the guys we could trust there and it all kind of kind of came together in the last month.”
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