Hawkeyes Hand Heller 1,000th Win

Iowa Baseball Coach Hits Milestone Saturday Against Ohio State

Iowa coach Rick Heller speaks with the home plate umpire during a game against Indiana on May 19, 2022 at Banks Field in Iowa City, Iowa. (Rob Howe/HawkeyeNation.com)

IOWA CITY, Iowa - Rick Heller’s family, friends, and former players came to celebrate history.

Iowa’s 15-3 win over Ohio State on Saturday at Duane Banks Field was the 1,000th career victory for Heller, the Hawkeyes’ head coach.

The coach said he knew how he was going to celebrate, but the party was going to end a little early for him.

“Well, it won’t be a long night for me, because we’re moving (Sunday’s) game up to noon,” Heller said, laughing. “We’ll be here pretty early in the morning. I’m hoping to get something good to eat, and then I’m probably going to have to kick a bunch of people out of the house.”

Heller said the milestone reminded him of all the players he coached, and the assistants who have worked for him.

Then he smiled.

“I’m also really glad it’s over with, so we can quit talking about it and move on,” Heller said.

“It means a lot,” Iowa second baseman Sam Hojnar said of the chance to be a part of the historic win. “We really didn’t know it was happening, but it was kind of a cool experience for us. He’s been around college baseball for a long time, and he’s been successful wherever he goes, so it was cool to be a part of that.”

It was a big crowd of well-wishers — “Probably half the town of Eldon was here,” Heller said, referring to his hometown in southern Iowa — and those who showed up saw another dominant performance for Iowa’s offense. The Hawkeyes (34-11 overall, 10-6 Big Ten) had 19 hits, putting constant pressure on the Buckeyes (22-25, 5-15), who used five pitchers in this game after using five in the 16-9 loss to Iowa on Friday.

Iowa took advantage of nine walks in Friday’s win, and got five more in this one. This was more a methodical pounding of the Buckeyes.

“We didn’t chase all day,” Heller said. “We forced them to throw it over the white part of the plate, and we put barrels on it.”

The Hawkeyes had three home runs — two from Hojnar and one from Will Mulflur. Hojnar drove in five runs, while the 3-4-5 batters in the lineup — Brennen Dorighi, Kyle Huckstorf and Sam Petersen — combined for six hits and eight runs batted in.

“With this lineup we have, there are so many slots when guys can get hot,” Hojnar said. “There’s been a lot of times when one guy gets going, and then the rest of us follow along. We have a pretty good lineup, one through nine.”

Iowa also churned through a lot of its bullpen on Friday, which is why Heller appreciated the five innings he got from starter Marcus Morgan (3-2). Morgan allowed three hits and walked six, but struck out seven, a 93-pitch outing that helped the Hawkeyes conserve some arms.

“It was not clean by any stretch,” Heller said. “But the thing Marcus did was he competed, fought hard, and battled out of some jams. Getting us five (innings) after last night, having to go to the bullpen as many times as we did, and allow our offense to get going … I was really proud of Marcus.”

Morgan’s best navigation through trouble came in the fourth and fifth innings.

Ohio State had runners on second and third with one out in the fourth, then Morgan struck out Henry Kaczmar and Hank Thomas to end the inning. The Buckeyes then loaded the bases in the fifth, but Heller decided to stick with Morgan, who got Tyler Pettorini to ground into a double play to end the inning.

“You never want to bring a guy into a bases-loaded jam,” Heller said. “So we just decided to give him one more hitter, and I’m glad we did.”

Heller took some time after the game to reflect on his career. He remembered his first season at Upper Iowa, when he had just 14 players on the roster. He remembered the stops at Northern Iowa and Indiana State, and then coming to Iowa and instead of purging the roster and starting over, choosing to stick with the players who wanted to stick with him.

“That first group, they had a choice,” he said. “They could have continued doing what they were doing, not want to be a part of something that we were talking about. But I told them we were going to love them and care for them like we recruited them. We weren’t going to run them off, that wasn’t my style, and everybody had a fair chance to see if they wanted to be a part of what we were doing.

“Because those guys believed in what we were doing, we were able to do this a lot quicker.”