Dominant pitching keeps Illini baseball rolling

CHAMPAIGN - Illinois reliever Tyler Jay was part of the Team USA national college team last summer, playing alongside players from traditional powers like Vanderbilt and Florida State.

They talked sometimes about which of those schools would have the best 2015. Jay mostly listened.

"Illinois was not part of that conversation at the time," he said.

It is now.

The Illini (40-6-1, 16-1 Big Ten) are first in the Big Ten and ranked among the top 10 teams in the country.

The Illini take a 21-game win streak, the longest in the nation, into a three-game homestand that begins Friday against Rutgers. They close the regular season next week with three home games against Nebraska.

Pitching is a big reason behind the streak: The team's four starters all carry earned run averages of 3.02 or less, led by Kevin Duchene's 8-1 record with an ERA of 0.78. A redshirt senior from Barrington, 6-foot-2 lefty Rob McDonnell, carries a 1.93 ERA with a 7-1 record in 14 appearances (11 starts).

But the guy with potentially the best arm on the staff waits in the bullpen. In 49 ⅓ innings in 23 appearances, Jay has nine saves, 54 strikeouts and four walks. The left-hander's mid-90s fastball leaves opponents flailing and his ERA is a team-best 0.73.

On many teams, maybe most, he'd be in the rotation. And Jay admits he'd prefer starting. But with the win streak and a shot at both a Big Ten title and hosting an NCAA regional, he can't argue with the results.

"I'm coming out there just doing what's asked of me, and it's working," the junior from Lemont said.

Having a pitcher who is among the best in the country in the pen gives Illinois an edge, Illini coach Dan Hartleb said. Baseball America ranks Jay the 16th best prospect in the country.

And Jay is a good candidate for the role, Hartleb says, because of that willingness to do whatever he's asked, an arm that allows him to pitch on consecutive days and a sense of calm under pressure.

"He seriously doesn't care," the 10th-year coach said. "If it's a runner on third and a one-run lead in the ninth inning, he wants the ball. If it's a start, he wants the ball. He doesn't care."

When Hartleb recruited Jay, he saw a good athlete, a pitcher and also a wide receiver on his high school football team. But Hartleb had no idea the breaking-ball pitcher with top velocity then in the mid-80s would turn into the Illini's shutdown guy.

Jay said he has gotten a little faster each year since he was a sophomore in high school, but really took off when he got to college, stopped playing football and lost some of the upper-body muscle he'd built up to fight off defensive backs.

"I got a little more arm-whipping action from that, and it's just kind of skyrocketed," he said, from 94 mph his freshman year to 96 the next season and, this year, 97 and 98.

"Yeah, it's been cool," he said, smiling and wondering out loud if there's even more in his arm.

Illinois began its win streak after dropping a game at Michigan State in late March. They swept Ohio State last weekend in Columbus, coming from behind for two of those wins.

Every time the team plays, that winning streak is on the line, and the scouts who've made Illinois a regular stop this spring have been there in large part to take a hard look at Jay. But he says the fun his team is having eases any pressure, and makes it easy to focus on right now rather than what might happen down the road.

"These are my 30 best friends over the last three years I've been here," he said. "It's kind of hard to think about being anywhere else right now."