After Indiana’s Devin Taylor unleashed a frozen rope throw to second base to retire Purdue’s Breck Nowik on an unconventional 7-4 putout, Ryan Kraft pumped his fist, walked into the third-base dugout and received hugs from his teammates.
The senior southpaw saved the best pitching performance of his lengthy career for his final start at Bart Kaufman Field, spinning seven shutout innings as Indiana blanked the Boilermakers, 8-0, for the first time in 11 years. His journey to that moment — putting the finishing touches on his best outing in an Indiana uniform — was anything but conventional.
Kraft’s freshman season was characterized by growing pains, for him and Jeff Mercer’s Hoosiers alike. Mercer brought in a plethora of young talent: Freshmen like Kraft, Josh Pyne, Carter Mathison and Brock Tibbitts would become program staples in the following years, but their maiden voyage on the seas of college baseball ended in a pedestrian 27-32 record. Kraft took his lumps, allowing 46 earned runs in 42.1 innings — a 9.78 ERA — but that adversity shaped him as a pitcher.
“He got hit really hard,” Mercer said. “He was always in the fight. We just kept running him out there.”
Kraft spent the summer of 2022 with the Kingsport Axmen of the Appalachian League. The Indiana lefty was a key contributor, posting a 4-0 record and a 1.73 ERA in five starts as the Axmen won their first league championship. He carried that success back to Bloomington for the 2023 season, earning first-team All-Big Ten honors as a Swiss Army knife in a stacked stable of Indiana arms that included future MLB draftees Craig Yoho, Connor Foley and Luke Sinnard, the latter of whom struck out a program-record 114 batters.
Pyne, Mathison, Tibbitts, shortstop Phillip Glasser and breakout freshmen Devin Taylor and Tyler Cerny led one of the Big Ten’s best offenses as the Hoosiers rolled to 43 wins, their most since Tracy Smith’s 2013 squad won 48 games en route to the College World Series. With a 6-1 record, five saves and a team-best 2.48 ERA in 61.2 innings, Kraft was dominant irrespective of his role.
“His sophomore year was magical,” Mercer said. “Primarily with an elevated sinker and a cutter.”
The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach can be effective in baseball, and Indiana had every reason to believe Kraft would continue his dominance on the mound in 2024. He toed the slab in the season-opener versus Duke, but he struggled. Kraft gave up four runs, including a pair of home runs, in just 1.1 innings, a harbinger of misfortunes to come throughout the season.
Kraft’s 2024 struggles were emblematic of the whole pitching staff, which did not find its groove until the last month of the regular season. While arms like Ty Bothwell, Drew Buhr and Foley settled in, Kraft never did. His ERA ballooned to 7.27 — nearly a threefold increase — in just 26 innings. Perhaps most worrying was that his home runs allowed per nine innings skyrocketed from 0.3 in 2023 to 2.8 in 2024. He was primarily utilizing the same two-pitch mix as 2023, but teams cracked the code at the second time of asking.
“Once you throw 70 innings of the same (pitch) sequences, people get a feel for it,” Mercer said. “The stuff didn’t move the same way last year.”
After Indiana’s 2024 season ended with back-to-back blowout losses in the Knoxville Regional, Kraft joined the Kalamazoo Growlers for his final season of summer ball, perhaps searching for answers. Anyone else in his position would — he went from being nearly unhittable in 2023 to being relegated to a low-leverage arm in 2024 — and he had a mountain of work in front of him. Mercer tasked him with diversifying his arsenal, looking for him to use a four-pitch mix similar to what he used in 2022.
It worked. Kraft pitched as well as he ever had at the college level. He went 6-2 with a 1.44 ERA in 56.1 innings, including two complete games. The Growlers won their second league championship in three years while Kraft was named the Northwoods League Pitcher of the Year.
“This summer was huge for him,” Mercer said. “Just to get out there and use four pitches again.”
In the fall, Kraft returned to Bloomington after his most successful season since high school. He got leaner, which allowed him to get his arm on top of his pitches as it was during his first-team All-Big Ten season in 2023. That gave his sinker more life. When combined with a “Bugs Bunny” curveball that can be as much as 20 miles per hour slower than his fastball, Kraft once again had the tools to be dominant entering his final season at Indiana.
“He worked really hard,” Mercer said. “He made an adjustment, and I think that allowed him to keep his cardio longer. It got his arm back on top so the ball sinks, and the two offspeed pitches hide his stuff better.”
Despite his league-best numbers in the Northwoods League, Kraft struggled at the beginning of his senior season in the more hitter-friendly environment of college baseball. He had an 8.38 ERA in 9.2 innings through the first month of the season, during which he pitched in just five games. He gave up multiple runs in four of those five outings and never pitched more than three innings.
During Indiana’s spring break trip to UCLA, something clicked. He pitched 4.1 scoreless innings while allowing just two hits as the Hoosiers took the series opener in Los Angeles. It was Kraft’s first appearance of four or more innings without allowing an earned run in nearly two years. In the outings that followed, he proved it wasn’t a fluke.
As Indiana’s season continued, Kraft’s ERA dropped — under five in early April and under four by the end of the month after 3.1 shutout innings at Iowa — as his re-tooled arsenal had him pitching nearly as well as he did in his all-conference sophomore season.
Unlike 2023, Kraft lacked a signature outing. In 2023, it was his dominant May 6 outing at Northwestern where he pitched through a career-high 7.1 innings while allowing four hits, no earned runs and striking out a season-high seven batters. This season, he pitched six full innings for the first time in Indiana’s 8-4 win at Abilene Christian, but he gave up four earned runs, which was also a season high.
When Purdue came to Bloomington on Friday night, Kraft stepped on the mound for his final start at Bart Kaufman Field. He didn’t get the chance to face Indiana’s biggest rival in 2024 on account of his struggles but turned in five innings of two-run ball when the Boilers last visited B-Town in 2023.
He did even better two years later. In front of nearly 2,500 fans, Kraft twirled seven efficient, scoreless innings while managing light traffic on the basepaths throughout the game. He relied heavily on his defense, averaging 12 pitches per inning.
Kraft’s sinker/curveball combination did exactly what it was supposed to do, keeping Purdue hitters off-balance and inducing weak contact. Three of his four strikeouts came via the curveball. Cole Gilley and Pete Haas secured the final six outs of the game and sealed the 8-0 win, Indiana’s first shutout victory over Purdue since 2014. As his career draws to a close in the coming weeks, Kraft has become everything Mercer looks for, and more, from a veteran pitcher molded under his guise.
“What a career transformation he’s had,” Mercer said postgame. “He became the consummate pitcher and, even throughout the course of this year, has gotten better and better. It’s what you coach for. Just a hell of a way to have your last outing at Indiana on this field. He’s been everything that you could ever ask of a Hoosier.”
Two years and three days after a signature start at Northwestern, Kraft painted a masterpiece in his final home start. The season is far from over — including Saturday, the Hoosiers have six regular season games remaining and the Big Ten Tournament to follow — but amidst an up-and-down career, Kraft has regained the same dominant form that made him Indiana’s best reliever in 2023.
“It’s a big deal for the (Big Ten) Tournament and for the young guys,” Mercer said. “Ryan (almost) had a 10 ERA as a freshman, and he just went seven shutdown innings as a senior. Some of those young guys that may take it on the chin, just keep going, keep showing up with the intention to learn and get better, and you can do similarly.”
At 28-21 overall and 13-12 in the Big Ten, Indiana needs a strong showing in the Big Ten Tournament to bolster its chances at an NCAA Tournament berth. Whenever Kraft gets the ball, he gives the Hoosiers everything he has. Described as “one of the most reliable pitchers in program history” on senior day, he still has a lot to give.
“There are a lot of ups and downs,” Kraft said postgame. “It’s been a great four years here. There’s still a lot of ball left to play.”
