Maryland baseball looks to right the ship as it welcomes Indiana to start Big Ten play

Maryland baseball has had a rough go of things lately. While the Terps are undefeated in midweek games this season, they have gotten swept in their last two weekend series, both at home.

After practice on Thursday, pitching coach Corey Muscara sat the team down in the dugout to go over some of the statistics that the team has compiled up to this point. Of his talking points, he mentioned that of the eight Maryland losses that were within their control, the team had the tying or winning run on in the later stages of the game. Any of those eight losses could’ve gone Maryland’s way, but little errors made a big difference in the final score.

“I think it’s a good break. We did have a rough eight games. There’s no shaking that,” Coach Rob Vaughn said. “Getting swept at home twice in a row is not what you’re looking for. It was a good time for it.”

Vaughn and Muscara sat down earlier in the week to put this together, and despite the statistics, whether bad or good, what matters to Vaughn at the end of the day is a plus-1 in the win column.

“We preach from day one and these guys hear me talk a ton, I don’t honestly remotely care about our batting averages or our our ERAs,” Vaughn said. “I wanna be in a situation where we’re winning baseball games.”

This weekend presents Maryland’s third tough task at home, as the Terps will defend their home turf against the Indiana Hoosiers, who know them well and vice versa.

“They’ve kind of turned into a rival for us over the last couple years,” Vaughn said. “There’s no historic rivalry between Maryland and Indiana, but we had a relationship between the previous coaching staff there. It’s just one of those things. You always wanna play well against your friends.”

Up next: Indiana Hoosiers (15-9, 3-0 Big Ten)

The Hoosiers are one of the better teams in the conference, having started conference play against Iowa last weekend. Maryland remembers this team well, as it was swept in Bloomington in the final series of the 2018 season when the Terps controlled their own destiny to make the Big Ten Tournament.

Indiana is known as a power-hitting team, and it’s shown that so far this season, leading the conference with 39 home runs as a team, 14 more than second-place Ohio State. They also lead in total runs, RBI and slugging. Four Hoosiers have five home runs or more, with Cole Barr leading the team with nine home runs, 18 RBI and a 1.038 OPS. Barr’s nine homers also lead the conference.

Hoosier pitching is also performing well, with a staff ERA of 3.18. Friday starter Pauly Milto leads all starters with a 2.28 ERA and a 4-1 record in six starts, giving up 11 earned runs and striking out 42 over 43.1 innings pitched.

“We know them. It’s a new regime over there,” Vaughn said. “I know they’re gonna be well-coached, I know they’re gonna play really hard and they’re a talented group. They got some really good players over in that other dugout.”

The series begins Friday at 6:30 p.m. ET and the game can be heard here.