Baseball Gameday: host Kentucky

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – It will be home sweet home for the Indiana baseball program for the next three weeks and it begins with a matchup against Kentucky at 5 p.m. on Tuesday (March 15) at Bart Kaufman Field.

Indiana (6-9) has won all three home games in 2022 and Kentucky (14-3) will play its first road game since the opening weekend of the season. The Hoosiers enter after being swept in a three-game series at Troy, while Kentucky swept its weekend series with High Point.

Gameday Info

Tuesday, March 15 (5 p.m.)
Probable Starters
IU: Luke Hayden, RHP, Fr.
UK: Seth Logue, RHP, So.

Live Video: bit.ly/3I4CUBq
Live Audio: bit.ly/IUAudio
Live Stats: bit.ly/IUStatbroadcast

Quick Hitters

After a rough opening weekend, the Indiana pitching staff has started to find its groove and it showed in a shutout of Cincinnati on Tuesday.
MORE ON PAGE 7
Redshirt-junior Matt Ellis has been seeing the ball well and is tied for the Big Ten lead in home runs. The left-handed hitter has also hit some mammoth home runs so far in 2022.
MORE ON PAGE 3 & 8
Redshirt-junior Jack Perkins is off to a solid start to the 2022 season on the mound in his first season in the cream and crimson.
MORE ON PAGE 7
Head coach Jeff Mercer owns 78 victories as the Indiana frontman and is poised to become the eighth IU skipper to reach 100 victories in the cream and crimson.
FULL BIO ON PAGE 4
Freshman Josh Pyne is off to a hot start to his college career and enjoyed a productive week at the plate last week, as he led the team in average, hits and RBIs.
MORE ON PAGE 7
Freshman Brock Tibbitts took a pair of pitches out of the park in the IU's season opener versus Miami (Ohio), but you don't have to look far in the record books for the last rookie to hit multiple home runs in a game.
MORE ON PAGE 3 & 7
Graduate student Tyler Doanes has been a table setter for IU and ranks among the national leaders in walks through four weeks of the season.
MORE ON PAGE 7
Indiana matched a school standard with four student-athletes selected in the first 10 rounds of the Major League Baseball Draft in 2021.
MORE ON PAGE 7

Scouting the Opponent

Kentucky enters with a 14-3 overall record and is 7-2 over its last nine games with a series win over TCU and a series sweep of High Point.
Two of the Wildcats three losses have come in the midweek, with Western Kentucky and Ohio defeating the Wildcats.
After starting the season with a three-game road series, UK has played its last 14 games at home. The Wildcats will play four straight on the road starting on Tuesday at Bart Kaufman Field.
Chase Estep enters the week hitting .476 with 25 runs, 30 hits and 21 RBIs on the season. He has walked 14 times to just eight strikeouts and owns a team-best seven home runs and six stolen bases.
As a team, Kentucky is tied for the national lead in hits (164) and is No. 24 nationally in runs scored (9.3).
The pitching staff is No. 20 in the NCAA in strikeouts per nine inning (11.2).

Series Notes

The midweek contest with the Wildcats will mark the 44th all-time meeting between Indiana and Kentucky.
It's a series that dates back to the 1903 season, when the two programs split a pair of meetings. They met seven times between 1903 and 1920 and didn't play again until 1974.
The longest winning streak in the series belongs to Kentucky at six games from April 19, 1977-April 22, 1981. Indiana preceded those six wins with five straight victories in the series from May 11, 1920-April 1, 1975.
Of the 44 all-time meetings, 10 of them have been played at neutral sites.

Next Event

Players Mentioned

Tyler Doanes

Luke Hayden

Jack Perkins

Josh Pyne

Brock Tibbitts

Indiana University Athletics