Purdue Baseball-Travel to LSU for top ten match up

The Boilermakers (1-7) are in Baton Rouge, LA for a tough top ten test this weekend vs the every so tough LSU Tigers (11-2).

Games are scheduled for 8pm, 730pm, and 2pm ET on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday respectively.

The team left early Thursday morning so they would be able to have a night practice at an empty Alex Box Stadium. It was a chilly 40 degrees and non-traditional Louisiana weather that the Boilers were not expecting.

Alex Box Stadium has been the home of the Tigers since 2009. It holds a jaw dropping 10,326 people, when they won their 6^th National Championship, a record attendance was on April 27, 2013 against South Carolina having 12,737 people watching.

Unlike Big Ten schools were we play a lot of our midweek games later in the season during Conference play, a lot of southern schools play them early in the year so that they don't have as many games midweek during conference play. With that being said, LSU has played the past two nights, Wednesday against Sacred Heart (8-1 Win) and Thursday at Northwestern St (8-1 Win). That makes for 8 games in 10 days for the LSU Tigers. Let's keep our fingers crossed that the wear and tear is catching up with them and we can knock them up when they are down.

The Boilers will face the SEC pitcher of the year on Friday night, Aaron Nola, who has notched a win in each of his three starts in the season. He is expected to go in the first round of the MLB draft after this season. His last outing was against Yale where he pitched a scoreless 6 innings with only one walk and recorded 10 strike outs. Nola has not allowed a run in 19 innings of work and keeping opp batting avg to .136. Our struggling offense will need to show up tonight and limit the strikeouts against this hard throwing righty.

Gavin Downs will be making his first start of the season on Saturday. Downs has come out of the bullpen three separate times and has recorded 15.2 innings of excellent work. Downs has been the go to guy for Coach Doug Schreiber when he needs to stop the bleeding. Downs (1-1) has a 1.72 ERA and is allowing the opposing team to hit .265. Surprisingly Downs has only recorded two strikeouts all season; he is more of a groundball type of pitcher.

The rest of the projected weekend starters are as follows:

• Jordan Minch (0-3) vs Aaron Nola (3-0)
• Gavin Downs (1-1) vs Kyle Bouman (3-0)
• Connor Podkul (0-1) vs Cody Glenn (1-1)

Not only does their pitching dominate but so does their hitting. Andrew Stevenson is hitting .432 in 37 AB and has knocked 2 triples already. Sean McMullen is batting .297 in 11 of their 12 games with 3 doubles, a triple and a home run while picking up a team leading 11 RBI's.

The Boilers are led by Kyle Wood who is hitting .357 through 8 games with 5 doubles and an OB% of .438. Cody Strong is struggling to collect a hit but has reached base safely in each of the eight games this season, having 6 walks and 2 hbp.

By the numbers: