Penn State Baseball looks to bounce back in second weekend of Big Ten play

Last week, we brought to you a piece that took a look at Penn State baseball’s early season success. A typically struggling program, the Nittany Lions jumped out to a 13-3 start on the season, one of the best in program history an were preparing to play their first Big Ten series of the season.

Unfortunately, for the Nittany Lions, they were swept by a struggling Minnesota team but were able to bounce back in their midweek victory over Binghamton on Tuesday by a final score of 5-3.

This weekend, the Nittany Lions will look to bounce back in Big Ten play as they travel to West Lafayette, Indiana to take on Purdue. The Boilermakers enter the weekend series with an 8-16 overall record and a 2-1 record in conference play. Last weekend, they took of two of three from the Northwesern Wildcats.

At this time last week, the Nittany Lions were ranked in the top-50 of the RPI rankings. Now just a week later, they have plummeted down to 104. A lot of that had to do with getting swept last week against Minnesota as well as a win over a lowly-rated Binghamton team. They have plenty of time to climb back up in those rankings but they’ll need to begin doing so this weekend.

If the Nittany Lions hope to do so, they’ll need to start getting more out of their bats. While their pitching has been superb so far though their first 20 games, the bats have been a bit quiet. Overall, they’re averaging just 4.75 runs per game and are hitting just .235 as a team. Those aren’t numbers that will allow you to pull out wins later in the season. If they can’t get their bats going soon, it will be a struggle down the stretch this season.

But for now, they must just take it one game at a time this season and that starts with their game Friday with a schedule first pitch at 4 p.m. Fans can catch a live stream of the game by subscribing to BTN Plus.