By Derek DeBurger
Louisville will continue to find themselves early in the season with another week of non-conference opponents.
The weekend series will be against the Northwestern Wildcats, a team that has been admittedly unimpressive since the start of the season. This season, the Wildcats lost their first two series against Tulane and Duke but swept all of last week’s against lesser competition. Northwestern is a power-conference team, but the Big Ten is not known for its stellar baseball, making it hard to get a solid read on this Wildcats team.
The batting in particular is nothing to write home about. Northwestern has only reached double-digit runs twice this season, both against Bethune-Cookman; one of those games went into extra innings. Oddly enough, Northwestern seems to bat best in the early and late innings. This may be purely coincidental, but it has been an early trend.
The Wildcats give up 6.2 runs a game, but a 20-run game skews those numbers way up. The Wildcats also rank 270th out of 295 in strikeouts per nine innings at 6.5, and 194th in hits per nine at 10.2. Northwestern relies heavily on its third-ranked fielding defense.
If Louisville can swing with power this weekend they should be able to take advantage of the poor pitching while avoiding the excellent defense, but that’s not something the Cards have excelled at so far this season.
I expect to see Louisville at least win their weekend series, and they have a good chance to pick up a weekday win, too. Hopefully, we’ll see some progress in addition to victories.
Photo Courtesy // Chris Carter, Louisville Athletics
