Another year of college baseball is upon us, with everybody else starting in recent weeks and the Big Ten finally getting underway on Friday evening. We’ve done all the work to get you up to speed on the Hoosiers with the rest of our preview series, so in this installment, I wanted to brief the masses on the rest of the conference.
Illinois Fighting Illini
2020 Record: 8-5
2019 B1G Finish: 3rd
Notable Losses: RHP Ty Weber (SF Giants), RHP Garrett Acton (Oakland A’s)
Key Players: RHP Andrew Hoffman, LHP Cole Kirschsieper, RHP Aidan Maldonado, INF Branden Comia, OF Danny Doligale
This, from all appearances, is a wildly different Illinois team than the one IU fans most recently saw back in 2019 when the Illini took a series off of the Hoosiers in Urbana-Champaign.