Rich Maloney stood to the side of the Michigan baseball field Tuesday night and chuckled. In a season like this, every victory is cause for a small party.

This season has been particularly tough on the Michigan baseball team — a two-time national championship program that expects to contend for Big Ten titles each season. It has also been tough on Maloney, who has never won less than 30 games in his head coaching career.

He’s never had a losing season, either. Yet with 12 games to go in the regular season, Michigan is 15-28. So, despite a recent home-and-home sweep of Notre Dame, this is clearly the toughest season Maloney has had in his 16-year head coaching career at Ball State and Michigan.

“Not even a question,” Maloney said. “I’ve been really fortunate. For 16 years we’ve won 30 games or more, so I’ve been pretty spoiled. I’ve had a lot of great players and great coaches with me.

“This has been really hard, been really hard.”

The potential for this one-year downfall showed the second week of the season. Michigan lost two projected weekend starters — seniors Kolby Wood (shoulder) and Travis Smith (arm) — for the season. It sent the Wolverines rotation into flux and forced Maloney to experiment with younger pitchers. Eleven pitchers have started at least one game this year for Michigan.

For a team that was in the Big Ten tournament semifinals last year, the losing revamped how players thought their season would unfold.

“Realistically, does it change expectations? Probably,” sophomore center fielder Patrick Biondi said. “But we have enough quality players on the team and enough quality arms and bats that we would still compete and have a chance to win the Big Ten.

“I think it’s just kind of a number of things going against us where we haven’t performed the way we should.”

The youth in the rotation led to Michigan’s hitters pressing. No Wolverine is hitting over .300 and the team has a combined average of .246.

Michigan lost its first seven games of the season by a combined score of 63-30 and has five losing streaks of three games or more.

The Wolverines are on pace to have a losing record for the first time since 2002, when they were 21-32. They are also on pace to break the Michigan record for most losses in a season, 32, which happened in 1992, 2000 and 2002.

“Early on in the season was the lowest point,” junior Coley Crank said. “When we pitched good, we didn’t hit good. When we hit good, we didn’t pitch good. We weren’t really playing all aspects of the game right.

“I think lately we’ve cleaned it up a lot and (are) playing a lot better.”

Michigan is 6-5 in its past 11 games and has showed signs of improvement. The offense is still struggling to score runs, but the Wolverines’ pitching has settled down.

That's a contrast to the start of the season, when the Wolverines weren’t in any games.

“We were getting beat pretty bad,” Maloney said. “We never had a chance to gain confidence, and then the kids started pressing and we didn’t have anybody hot.”

Injuries have hampered the Wolverines, too. Shortstop Derek Dennis missed three weeks. A third pitcher, sophomore Kyle Clark, broke his right hand last week and is done for the season. And Tuesday, Maloney said second baseman and team captain Anthony Toth is out for the year with a stress fracture in one of his legs.

Maloney has slept less than he’d like as he tries to plug holes in an ever-changing lineup and rotation. On Tuesday he said he had no idea who his third starter would be for this weekend’s series against Minnesota.

Despite all this, Michigan is 6-9 in the Big Ten, three games out of third place and two games out of fourth place. The top six teams in the league make the league tournament.

Which means Michigan could still slip into the postseason.

“What I say is we’re not surrendering,” Maloney said. “We’re going to keep fighting and the way the Big Ten is, it’s not far-fetched to make the playoffs if you got hot.”

Michael Rothstein covers Michigan sports for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by email at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein.