The Penn State baseball team was sick of the road, sick of the cold and sick of losing.

And since it controlled only one of those conditions, it decided to change it.

The Nittany Lions started winning.

"Nobody likes to make excuses," Doug Rodio said. "But these things take time."

Heading to Michigan for a four-game Big Ten Conference series starting today at 3 p.m., the Lions hope the early season kinks are worked out. They will play two more games at Ray Fisher Stadium tomorrow at 1 p.m. and another at the same time on Sunday.

After going 6-14 in their first 20 games, the Lions have improved over their last five games and upped their record to 9-15 with a 6-1 win against Bucknell on Wednesday.

The Wolverines split a double-header with Oakland on Wednesday, bringing them to 10-9 on the year. They played just one of their scheduled four game series last weekend against Iowa because of severe cold weather.

"Missing those games was very tough for us," Michigan coach Geoff Zahn said. "To have those Big Ten games under our belt would have been nice."

Michigan will go with a rotation of Bobby Korecky (3-1, 2.43 ERA), Nick Alexander (1-2, 5.32 RBI), Jim Brauer (0-0, 3.78 RBI) and Tim Leveque (1-1, 0.00).

Korecky has thrown three consecutive complete games and has been the Wolverine's most consistent pitcher.

"He's a hard nose competitor with a solid fast ball, good breaking ball and an effective change-up," Zahn said.

Penn State will counter with Dan McCall (1-0, 3.45 RBI), Justin Nash (2-2, 4.29 RBI), Aaron Tressler (2-2, 7.40 RBI) and Pete Yodis (2-4, 6.98 RBI).

Yodis got the win against the Bisons, throwing eight innings allowing just one unearned run.

"We're ecstatic about the performance from Yodis," Penn State head coach Joe Hindelang said. "That's going to be huge for us. We need more of the same this weekend."

Michigan and Penn State have had parallel struggles so far this season.

"We had trouble getting the bats going in the early season," Zahn said of his Wolverines. "With the questionable weather it's tough to get momentum going."

Penn State's game against Bucknell was a microcosm of these troubles.

"It took us two or three times around the order to get the bats going," said Penn State center fielder Zack Smithlin, who has a ten-game hitting streak heading into the weekend. "But once we get that momentum going we just roll. That's been a problem all season long. We need to keep the momentum going."

Wednesday's game should have helped that cause. The Lions are finally developing the rhythm that carried them through last season.

"It finally seems like we have everything working together," Smithlin said. "It's what coach always talks about: playing against the game. It sounds very corny, but that's what we need to do."