For the Illinois baseball team it all comes down to pitching.

It seems simple, but when the Illini have pitched well this season the team has had success. When they haven’t the team has struggled. So when Illinois takes the field this weekend at Penn State, the games will come down to the performance of the pitchers.

“We’ve done a great job all year of throwing strikes,” head coach Dan Hartleb said. “If you look at our strikeouts to walks, it’s very good. If we continue to pound the zone it gives us an opportunity to win each and every day.”

Illinois is currently in the midst of a three-game losing streak. Over the past three games, a few key pitches that were left up in the strike zone cost the Illini the game.

“With the wind blowing out last week I thought we were just thinking about too much and we left a few pitches up,” junior pitcher John Kravetz said. “I still thought we did a decent job as a staff. We just have to be better this weekend.”

For the pitching staff to be effective on the weekend, Kravetz said it will come down to two things, remaining composed and keeping the ball down in the zone.

Kravetz thought a few pitches got away from the Illini in the last few games and that those pitches up in the zone are what cost the Illini games. He added that the Illini will need to take it one pitch at a time.

“I thought things kind of dog-piled a little last week,” Kravetz said. “Back-to-back hits and then all of a sudden we blink our eyes and three runs have scored. Things got ahead of us a little bit last week so that needs to stop.”

Illinois and Penn State have both had similar starts to the Big Ten schedule. The Nittany Lions opened conference play with a five-game winning streak before losing three of their last five. Illinois lost its first Big Ten game before putting together a six-game winning streak directly followed by a three-game losing streak.

Sophomore catcher Jason Goldstein said he heard Penn State likes to swing early in the count, a fact that Kravetz said the Illini could use to their advantage.

“They’re kind of similar to Michigan in that way,” Kravetz said. “They’re a pretty aggressive team. We gotta get ahead with our off-speed, do stuff like that. Keep them off balance. Have their aggression work against them.”

On top of having a good pitching performance and limiting the team’s mistakes, Hartleb said there is one other aspect in which the Illini need to excel in order to have success on the weekend.

“We need to get guys on base early, with less than two outs, and then we need to do a good job with our situational hitting,” Hartleb said. “We’re very capable, we’ve done it at different times this year but we just have to gain a little consistency.”

Nicholas can be reached at [email protected] and @IlliniSportsGuy.