Rick Heller explains Brody Brecht's importance to Iowa's late-season pitching rotation

The Iowa Hawkeyes entered the 2024 Big Ten Baseball tournament as the conference’s five-seed. Matched up with four-seeded Michigan in their opening game — starting pitcher Brody Brecht was the choice for Iowa to start on the mound on Wednesday.

Coming into the tournament, Brecht (4-3, 3.55 ERA) started in 14 games for the Hawkeyes where he logged 71.0 innings pitched where he allowed 28 earned runs compared to 118 strikeouts over that stretch. According to head coach Rick Heller, Brecht’s effort was a major contributor to the Hawkeyes late-season success.

“We tried to be consistent all year,” Heller explained during a mid-game interview on Wednesday. “And then this year we’ve had to deal with some injuries and it took us a while, about five weeks ago to kind of get used to the new lineup and how we had to do things to score runs and the guys adapted and just kept playing hard. And then Brody Brecht really stepped up the last last five weeks of the season and has pitched great.

“We’ve been getting good work out of our bullpen. It took us a while to kind of figure out the guys we could trust there and it all kind of kind of came together in the last month.”

Through five innings, Brecht struck out seven of the 20 Wolverines batters that he faced while allowing two hits and one walk, keeping Michigan scoreless over that stretch.

“He’s been good, but he lost his command just a little bit in the last two innings (fourth and fifth) there, but definitely has the stuff to work out of it. And he did,” Heller continued. “He’s going to go 110 [pitches], maybe even 115. We’ll see how he feels and if his velocity stays up and all those things, but right now he’s battling doing a good job working himself out of a couple self-inflicted jams.”

The sixth inning saw Brecht allow the first three Michigan batters to reach base, loading the infield with no outs and presenting Iowa with its most difficult defensive stand of the day. Brecht would fan the next two batters — but a wild pitch ruined the Hawkeye pitcher’s scoreless affair.

Two runs were scored in the bottom of the sixth and the Wolverines took a 2-1 lead. Michigan’s Will Rogers grounded out to end the inning, but the damage had been done. He ended the sixth inning having thrown 91 total pitches.