Baseball to take on Penn this weekend for division title

After an average weekend in Ithaca, the Columbia baseball team is teetering on the cusp of the playoffs.

The Lions played solid baseball this past weekend, splitting a four-game series with Cornell on the road. But the team was unable to capitalize against one of its weaker Ivy League opponents, adding some drama to this weekend’s highly anticipated series against Penn.

Currently, Columbia enjoys a two-game lead over Penn in the Gehrig Division, but the outcome of this weekend’s games will decide if Columbia has indeed seized another opportunity to play for the league title. The Lions just need to win two out of four games to clinch the division. The team would then move on to face the winner of the Dartmouth-Brown series, as the two teams remain tied for first place in the Rolfe Division.

If Penn wins three games this weekend, it will force a rematch between the two teams for the right to play for the Ivy League Championship. Last season, Cornell and Princeton found themselves in the same situation. However, if Penn sweeps Columbia, the Quakers will seize the outright divisional victory.

Although the team would have liked one more win last weekend to settle some nerves, the situation, as it stands, is advantageous and the pressure is on Penn, not on Columbia.

Infielder Alex Ferrera echoed these sentiments. “We would have liked to get one more at Cornell, but coach keeps telling us, ‘Don’t look back, just keep looking forward.’ All we need to do is win two games.”

But if fans are looking for some reason to be worried, the team’s power outage last weekend is a potential cause for concern.

The Columbia offense, which led the Ivy League several weeks ago, cooled off a bit, although it was still aggregately the second best offense in the league as of April 20—second only to Penn. The team only managed to post seven runs against Cornell’s average pitching staff and was shut out in two out of the four games played.

“We definitely had an off weekend at the plate,” Ferrera said. “The guys might have been trying to do a little too much, but the Cornell pitchers did a pretty good job of locating their pitches.”

Columbia dropped the first game of four by allowing the lone run of the ballgame with two outs in the final frame. Darkness halted the second game of Sunday’s doubleheader midway through the fifth inning, but the Lions were already down 7-0 at that point. Overall, the team scratched out just nine total hits between the two games serving as the bookends of the series.

But in the middle two games, the Lions’ offense banged out 21 hits, although they accounted for just seven runs. In the second game of the series, the Lions put runners on base in six of the nine innings, but the clutch, two-out hit that has been so crucial all season seemed to elude them.

“We were still hitting the ball, but maybe not as much in terms of stringing hits together and capitalizing on the big inning like we usually do,” Ferrera said.

The team ran themselves out of a few innings, hit into one double play, and left eight men on base—but still edged out the one-run victory.

The best offensive weekends were had by the team’s power-hitting “Alex” tandem. Alex Ferrera knocked his seventh home run of the season in a Columbia win, and Alexander Aurrichio smacked his 10th homer of the year, making him the first Columbia player in over seven years to reach double digits in home runs.

The most encouraging aspect of Columbia’s game was the continued dominance of its starting pitching. Pat Lowery (3-3) suffered the loss in the first game, but threw six scoreless innings, scattering just three hits before surrendering the lone Cornell tally.

In the second game, Tim Giel allowed just four hits in seven scoreless innings, and Dan Bracey matched Giel’s performance, improving his record to 4-3 in the third game. The back end of the rotation struggled a bit in the fourth game, in which Stefan Olson lasted just two innings before being replaced by Eric Williams.

Overall, the starting pitchers gave up just 17 hits in 22 2/3 innings of work. Lowery, Giel, and Bracey allowed just 11 hits and one earned run in 20 2/3 innings for a combined ERA of 0.43.

Ferrera summarized the pitching performances as “ridiculous,” saying, “As an infielder, I know our pitchers haven’t been walking a lot of guys—they’ve been throwing strikes and getting people out, which means the games move quicker and you just feel more comfortable overall knowing that you’re going to get a good performance.”

The pitching staff will continue to be the defining aspect of the team when Columbia faces Penn, which scored no less than seven runs per game last weekend. Penn’s offense is a bit hotter heading into the weekend, while Columbia’s pitching appears to be more dominant, but overall the two teams appear to be solidly even. Only head-to-head competition will tell them apart. Put on your seatbelts, folks.