Spring is here, sort of. Well, it has arrived in the warm-weather cities and that means college baseball has made its emphatic return. As I gazed at the glorious, seemingly endless scoreboard on opening day this past Friday, I was reminded of the unfettered chaos that makes the sport so magical. Multiple 12-run blowouts, balls plunking off fielders’ heads and trickling into foul territory—it’s perfect. So, if you are a college baseball fanatic or a Northwestern athletics diehard, stop by every Wednesday
to catch up on everything you may have missed. Don’t let ESPN+ technical difficulties or the idiocy of B1G baseball in Eugene, Oregon exclude you from a (hopefully) electric Northwestern baseball 2026 campaign.
This year could be one of the more consequential ones in recent Northwestern Baseball history. Yes, coach Ben Greenspan missed the B1G tournament last year. And yes, the team had a losing record in conference play for the fifth straight year. Not-so-fun fact: Northwestern baseball’s last season with a conference winning percentage higher than 55 percent was…2006. All that aside, this team has genuine talent, real motivation, and is hungry. A year-over-year increase of nine conference wins from 2024 to 2025 is not a coincidence; Greenspan is building something sustainable, but that takes time. We will look back at 2026 as a true pivot year for the program: the affirmation of competency or the confirmation of a mediocre destiny, my prediction is the former.
So, let’s get started with what went down in Houston over the weekend.
The Good
If baseball games were decided based on the number of subtle head nods of approval that each team receives for a solid at-bat or a well-executed relay, Northwestern would have swept Rice. Unfortunately, that’s not how the game of baseball works and Northwestern dropped the first two games of its opening series.
Wins and losses aside, this lineup is serious. Say a time traveler told me prior to the opening game that the Wildcats would lose by just a run in a game where their top three hitters Owen McElfatrick, Jack Lausch, and Ryan Kucherak would combine for one hit and seven strikeouts. I would’ve told the time traveler that starter Sam Hliboki had the game of his life. In reality, the score was 7-6 and it was right fielder Jackson Freeman, transfers Noah Ruiz and Jay Slater along with freshman designated hitter Nick Barron who notched RBIs. Seriously capable teams share some universal qualities, one of those being lineup depth and if Greenspan can get consistent production from the bottom half of the lineup it’ll go a long way in making this squad competitive.
Another one of those critical attributes of winning baseball teams is versatility. Despite the two one-run losses, the Wildcats showcased their ability to adapt to the pace of any game. They led the second game of the doubleheader 1-0 entering the bottom of the eighth inning and while there are no moral victories, I’m confident the ‘Cats will come out on the right side of some of those one-run contests throughout the season. In baseball, you sometimes just need to give yourself a chance.
The Bad
There is a different, darker, quite painful side of that one-run loss coin: execution. Two one-run losses on the same day? That’s agony. You can go down the list to try and pinpoint poor decisions or unfortunate bounces in each game that were the deciding moment, but the reality is, losses like the two Northwestern suffered come as a result of the accumulation of small errors.
In game two of the series, for example, the offense went 0-5 with runners in scoring position. You don’t need to be an expert to know it’s difficult to win ballgames without any semblance of situational hitting. Yes, Jack Counsell made a painful error to break the shutout and open the floodgates for a damning eighth inning, but more sound execution in the first seven innings would set you up so that one error doesn’t change the entire fabric of the contest.
On the spectrum of warning signs if poor execution is a dead fire alarm battery chirp, the lack of strikeouts for Northwestern pitchers is a police siren. Rice struck out a total of eight times over the three games; in the final game of the series–which Northwestern won by 11 runs–the ‘Cats somehow struck out more than the Owls. Hliboki, who put on a gutsy performance, simply could not get any whiff on his fastball. Despite Ryan Weaver’s stunning outing in which he threw seven scoreless, he struggled to put guys away once he got ahead in the count. There is a reason we have seen Major League Baseball and college teams alike prioritize strikeout and homerun rate more than any other pitching metric over the last decade: it’s due to the simple concept that you can’t score runs on a strikeout and you can’t get out hitting a home run. It will be imperative for Northwestern pitchers to find their strikeout stuff as conference play approaches to avoid some potentially eye-popping box scores.
The Best
Simply put, Jackson Freeman is the truth. All he’s ever done is play sound, all-around baseball at the collegiate level. He’s played 52 games in each of his first two seasons in Evanston and is the definition of a winning player. After a slight dip in production last year, this might be his full-blown breakout season. He took home B1G Player of the Week honors and recorded hits in every game. In 12 at-bats he hit three home runs, accrued eight (yes, eight) base knocks to go along with seven RBIs and only one strikeout. For a guy to do as much damage while only striking out one time is almost unheard of. His swing is so simple from the left side and he seemingly never gets beat inside, even against Rice’s powerful lefty Brayden Sharp. I have no doubt Freeman will continue to be a major impact player for the ‘Cats this season.
Ryan Weaver also deserves a major shoutout. Seven innings, zero runs, three hits, 98 pitches all capped off by a gutsy strikeout to end his outing as his velocity waned. Greenspan so desperately lacked these types of performances on the mound last year and he’ll need more of them for this team to play up to their full potential.
Beyond Freeman and Weaver’s marvelous weekends, I couldn’t end this week’s column without a mention of Noah Ruiz’s two home run game in the series finale. In my Northwestern infield preview I noted how Ruiz generates pull-side power that far outpaces his 5-foot-10, 180-pound frame. And, would you look at that, Ruiz clubbed two pull-side home runs in his third game as a Wildcat! There’s nothing like being right.
All in all, it was an electric, sometimes painful, yet illuminating opening weekend for the Wildcats. Make sure to check back in next Wednesday for all you missed from Spartanburg, South Carolina, where Northwestern will take on Cornell and Boston College over the weekend.
