April 3, 2021

By John T. Lock

University of Southern Illinois Athletics

CARBONDALE, Ill. - The No. 28 ranked SIU baseball team split a doubleheader with Illinois State on Saturday at Itchy Jones Stadium.

Illinois State won the first game 6-3 before SIU bounced back to take the second game, 8-4. Illinois State leads the series, 2-1, with the final game set for 1 p.m. on Sunday.

"The tough thing to do is to show up after a loss," SIU head coach Lance Rhodes said. "When you were off to the start that we were off to (19-1), and then you lose four in a row, you wonder where the energy and effort going to be on a back end of a doubleheader? That was really the thing I challenged our guys with. I'm fine with us losing games. We're not always going to play well. But I was most disappointed in the energy and effort we gave in the first game. I told our guys, 'If you could have been in the crowd watching yourselves play today, you would have been embarrassed with the effort we gave. Win or lose, we have to come out with a better attitude and effort in the second game,' and they did. They responded extremely well."

In the fourth inning of the first game, SIU trailed 3-2 when catcher Austin Ulick pulled up with an apparent hamstring injury rounding first on a flyout. The Salukis were already without its other catcher, Tony Rask, who was hit in the head with a pitch last weekend. Without a catcher, SIU turned to the game's starting pitcher, Ben Chapman, who was a catcher in junior college baseball.

The Redbirds (10-15, 2-1 MVC) tacked on a couple runs to earn a 6-3 win in the first game, but Chapman became one of the heroes for SIU (20-5, 4-3 MVC) in the second game. Chapman, who hadn't caught or hit at all in more than a year, went 1-for-3 with an RBI double, a run scored, and two walks. After throwing 81 pitches as the starting pitcher in the first game, he caught the final three innings of the first game and all nine innings of the second game, and ended the second game himself by throwing out a runner trying to steal.

"Think about what he did receiving, blocking, and throwing; it was a pretty incredible day, really," Rhodes said of Chapman. "To be able to hop back there with no notice and do what he did was pretty incredible."

While Chapman was the biggest story of the day, Brad Harrison made the biggest pitches. SIU held a 5-3 lead in the sixth inning of the second game when Illinois State loaded the bases with no outs, threatening to send SIU to a fifth-straight loss. Then, the Salukis committed an error on a sure-fire double play ball to allow Illinois State to get within 5-4. In that situation, approaching 100 pitches, Harrison struck out three-straight hitters to preserve SIU's lead.

"Three-straight outs with the bases loaded; he just bears down and gets it done. That probably was the game right there, when he did that. It was huge," Rhodes said.

The Salukis tacked on two runs in the next half-inning, and Matthew Steidl pitched three outstanding innings in relief to earn the save that snapped SIU's four-game losing streak.

Tristan Peters (Winkler, Man.) also went 3-for-3 and scored two runs for the Salukis in the second game.

SIU is battling through its first rough stretch of the season, having lost four out of its last five after starting the season 19-1.

"Early in the season, when we were scorching hot, it seemed like every ball we put in play just missed a diving infielder for a single, or it just missed an outfielder and got into the gap for a double," Rhodes said. "Right now, in this funk that we're in, it seems like everything we hit, the third baseman jumps up and catches one behind his head again. They dive in the gap and catch a ball that could be a double. We're not getting many breaks right now, but we're also not creating many breaks with the way that we're playing."

UP NEXT: The fourth game of the series is Sunday at 1 p.m.