Nebraska Baseball Crushes Creighton To Open Big Week

The Nebraska baseball team opened a week of must win games by hammering in-state rival Creighton 15-2 on Tuesday night.

The Huskers’ win comes in the final week of the regular season and just two days before the Nebraska baseball team will start a pivotal series against the Indiana Hoosiers. The outcome of that series, which oddly enough starts on Thursday instead of Friday, will help determine the final seedings for the Big Ten conference tournament.

This week will also play a big part in determining the Cornhuskers’ resume when it comes to whether or not Darin Erstad’s boys deserve an at-large bid to the NCAA Regionals. While the Nebraska baseball team will be looking to win the conference tournament outright, it’s always safe to cover all of a team’s bases and a 3-1 or 4-0 week would go a long way towards clinching a birth.

The 15-2 victory over Creighton seemed almost too easy right from the very beginning. The Nebraska baseball team wasn’t supposed to take on the Jays last night but a rain out earlier in the season moved the game to May 17. That was likely a big negative for the Bluejays who played an odd day-night doubleheader against the Huskers and the University of Nebraska-Omaha earlier Tuesday.

While Creighton might wish to blame the doubleheader for the thumping they received, it’s unlikely they would have been able to keep Scott Schreiber under wraps no matter how fresh they could have been. These days, it’s hard to imagine any pitching staff handling the sophomore slugger very easily. While he’s quietly put together an incredible season, we may have witnessed his coming out party on Tuesday night.

Schreiber went 5 for 6 (he was 5 for 5 at one time) at the plate, blasted two home runs and drove in five runs. Those two home runs were impressive enough but it turns out they were the first home runs Creighton allowed at home since 2014.

The Nebraska baseball team dominated the Jays much like Schreiber dominated the Jays pitchers almost from the first pitch. The Huskers opened the scoring with three runs in the bottom of the first. After Creighton managed to get on the board in the top of the third thanks to Nicky Lopez’s first career homer, the Cornhuskers responded with three more runs in the bottom of the frame.

It was during the three-run third that Schreiber hit his first of two home runs, this one a solo shot. Some bad defense and shoddy pitching allowed Darin Erstad’s boys to scratch across two more runs to make the score 6-1. As the game moved to the top of the fifth, Creighton looked like it might be rallying thanks to a double, and two singles with just one out. Just when the wheels seemed like they might be about to come off, Max Knutson righted the ship by forcing a double play to end the inning.

In the bottom of the sixth, the Nebraska baseball team put the game away with four more runs thanks in large part to Schreiber’s three-run blast. With the score 10-2, the Husker win was a foregone conclusion but Erstad’s boys weren’t done yet.

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In order to put an exclamation point on the win, the team scored five runs in the bottom of the eighth to make it 15-2. While the win by itself is a positive from the point of view of getting another victory and taking the season series from an in-state rival, it should also help the Huskers’ RPI. The Nebraska baseball team came into the game with an RPI ranking of 55 while Creighton stood at 39.