Fresh off Indiana meltdown, can Purdue still win the Big Ten?

What does it feel like to be tied or ahead for 80% of the innings of a baseball series but win a third of its games?

“I needed a day to cool off,” senior Purdue outfielder Keenan Taylor said.

“Big, big letdown,” said senior pitcher Kyle Iwinski, who had Taylor’s defense to thank in part for his six scoreless innings pitched Sunday.

“Anytime you have a rivalry weekend,” head coach Greg Goff said with his Southern drawl, “and you come up a couple of pitches, a couple of innings short, you’re always disappointed.”

Purdue lost its hold on the Big Ten just a week after it wrangled it in the first place, and to Indiana, no less. The cream and crimson are Purdue’s rivals in any sport, every day of the week, but the Boilers had another bone to pick with the Hoosiers over the weekend: They were the team everyone believed in. And Purdue wasn’t.

“Nobody believed in us,” senior outfielder Mike Bolton Jr. said. “They picked us 11th in the league. I mean, that was a big slap in the face.”

The Hoosiers were picked second in the poll in question, voted on by the conference’s head coaches ahead of the season. And that the Boilers are still smarting from that mid-February slap says plenty about how the weekend’s inchwide miss at a convincing stake to the conference lead went over with the players. Still, there’s more baseball to play.

“I sent out a text to ‘em first thing this morning like, ‘New week, same goal,’” Goff said.

There are seven games to go, six against Big Ten opponents, and Taylor said the team’s most recent losses can serve as a good reminder of how hard, and how fast, things can go wrong, lessons that escape a team when it’s winning.

Purdue is tied for second place now with the Hoosiers and Nebraska, and all three sit a game behind Illinois. The Illini, too, were a surprise this season after a losing 2023. Purdue has a crack at them in its final series of the year, in which it will again play to its home supporters.

In the meantime, though, Purdue heads to UIC for a midweek game before readying for Michigan. And for the Illinois series to matter, Purdue will need to take care of business. That’s why Goff was only willing to mention the Wolverines when talking about the future.

“You make sure you keep your eyes on the target,” Goff said as he pantomimed blinders with his hands. “In baseball, it’s such a long season, you can’t get distracted.”

The Boilers appear good enough to win the whole thing, if their April lead wasn’t proof enough. They’re first in the conference in runs scored and second in runs allowed. Fourth and second, respectively, in conference play only.

It’ll be about the high-leverage moments down the stretch, as baseball often is. Limiting bullpen blowups. Throwing knockout-punch innings of run production.

“As a team, I feel like we could do a better job of executing hit and runs and playing small ball a little bit more,” Bolton, a leadoff hitter, said. “And when we have our pitchers come in, we gotta be able to have those guys get us on and off the field. It’s just gotta come from everybody.”

A title would give momentum to a program that is far from the class of the Big Ten. The last title came in 2012, and 1909 before that.

“I mean, we had almost 10,000 people in four games last week,” Goff said. “Who would have thought that (would happen) just a year or so ago? So I'm just so grateful for it.”

To get off the schneid, Purdue needs to beat a team it knows it should Tuesday in UIC.

“We just got to keep the momentum,” Bolton said. “We just had a great lift and we get to go to UIC and whoop their ass, so it would feel good to beat up on somebody after a couple losses like that.”