Stryker Report: Rough Waters Early

Young Husker baseball team making little progress through season’s first month

Nebraska fans show up in large numbers to support their team. And after suffering through painful losing seasons in football and basketball, they were hopeful that Will Bolt’s Nebraska baseball team, which returned a bunch of talented young players from last year’s NCAA Regional qualifier and was rated in the preseason Top 25, could brighten the mood around Husker men’s sports.

With the season less than half over, the Huskers are three games below .500 as they open their Big Ten season. Their embarrassing series loss to Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, including a disastrous 21-4 beating Sunday, does not boost anyone’s hopes of a baseball season to be proud of.

This team has shown some spunk and grit, coming from behind to win three games in the bottom of the ninth in the past week, but its pitching and hitting have both been subpar much of the season, and most alarming, its fielding has been terribly erratic.

There’s no denying the Huskers are young, but although their 2021 recruiting class was rated No. 21 in the nation by Baseball America last September, apparently it’s not the kind of young talent that can put a scare into the hearts of opponents — at least not yet — even amid one of the weaker schedules in college baseball so far this season. This is certainly not a Top 25-caliber team. Time will tell if it can contend for the top half of what appears to be an unimpressive Big Ten Conference this spring. Right now, these Huskers are longshots to qualify for the regionals at all, let alone host them.

Bolt is the best of the three head coaches recently hired by Bill Moos to lead the Husker football, basketball and baseball programs. His leadership will be tested heavily over the next two months.

Husker outfielder Tyler Palmer / Dillon Galloway, Nebraska Athletics