This post was updated May 8 at 10:23 p.m.
The Bruins entered their 2025 campaign not having made the NCAA tournament since 2022.
And for the first time in over five years, UCLA appeared destined to host its first regional since 2019, when it was 25-5 and a top-10 team in the country.
But the prospect of postseason baseball at Jackie Robinson Stadium appears to be slowly slipping away.
No. 18 UCLA baseball (34-14, 17-7 Big Ten) has six regular-season contests to right the ship ahead of the postseason. UCLA traveled to Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, on Wednesday and will face Illinois (27-19, 12-12) at Illinois Field in the Prairie State for the first time in program history in a three-game series that begins Friday.
Despite a Tuesday morning projection from D1 Baseball that the Bruins would host a regional, UCLA has gone 9-9 since its blistering 30-game start, most recently succumbing to its first three-game skid of the season Tuesday evening after losing to Long Beach State.
But second-place UCLA will have a chance to trim down the 2.5-game gap between itself and conference-leader Iowa, which plays a nonconference series against Oregon State over the weekend.
“We’re just looking forward to compete,” said redshirt freshman outfielder Aidan Espinoza. “We know they’re very good at home, and they’ve got guys that could do damage against us.”
Although the Fighting Illini sit at an even .500 record in Big Ten play, seven of their 12 wins have come at home, where they have only dropped two conference games. However, Illinois was swept in its last weekend series by Rutgers in New Jersey.
The Bruins were held to just four hits in Long Beach on Tuesday, with two coming from sophomore shortstop Roch Cholowsky, who extended his career-long hitting streak to 12 games, slashing .367/.511/.728 on the season.
The Bruins have gone 8-8 in enemy territory this season, scoring just 27 runs across those eight losses compared to the 24-6 record and +127 run differential they boast at home. In fact, UCLA’s past six losses have come away from Jackie Robinson Stadium.
“We have to be able to win on the road. The road is the most important part of the season,” Espinoza said. “If you want to win Omaha, you have to do it on the road and not at Jackie Robinson Stadium.”
Over the Bruins’ past 13 games, their starting pitchers have only made it through five innings thrice and six innings once. And after the trio of redshirt junior southpaw Ian May, junior right-hander Michael Barnett and sophomore right-hander Landon Stump allowed 13 runs across 11.1 innings pitched in UCLA’s latest series loss to USC, a bounce-back performance from the weekend rotation could be key to defeating Illinois.
Outfielder Vytas Valincius, who went 3-for-3 with a stolen base Tuesday, leads the Fighting Illini with 52 RBIs and 63 hits. Fellow outfielder Collin Jennings paces the team with 12 home runs and is slashing .313/.416/.695.
In their final regular-season road series, the Bruins have a chance of winning their first weekend away from Westwood since the end of March.
“It’s all or nothing. We’re pretty angry right now and we’re hungry,” said sophomore right-hander Cal Randall. “We want to take them out and just rise to the top … we’re ready to attack these guys and give it all we got.”
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