Baseball: Princeton splits season-ending series with Cornell

It was a four-run third inning that lifted the Cornell baseball team over Princeton at Clarke Field Friday afternoon, ending the Tigers’ (14-28 overall, 11-9 Ivy League) playoff hopes and removing the team from contention for the Ivy League championship. Cornell (23-17, 11-9) first baseman Ryan Plantier led off the inning with a solo home run to left field, setting the stage for a rally in which the Big Red offense scored three additional runs. Two hits and two walks resulted in one run and loaded the bases for Big Red left fielder Spencer Souza, whose single up the middle drove in another two runs.

Coming into the series, Princeton needed to sweep Cornell in four games and hope for Columbia to drop its series against Penn in order to win the Lou Gehrig Division and earn an Ivy League Championship series berth. The loss, which was followed by a second loss to Cornell on Friday afternoon and two Tiger victories over the Big Red in Ithaca on Sunday, removed Princeton from playoff contention.

“It was similar to a lot of the games that we had lost throughout the year,” head coach Scott Bradley said. “We got really good pitching. [Senior starter] Zak Hermans pitched well. But we only scored two runs in the first game and one run in the second game. In college baseball, you need to be able to hit consistently and score some runs, and it’s hurt us this year that we haven’t been able to come up with big hits when we needed them. That’s just the way it’s been most of the year.”

The trend of subpar hitting continued throughout the series, even in the doubleheader sweep on Sunday. Following a 2-1 loss to the Big Red in the second matchup on Friday afternoon, the Tigers rebounded on Sunday when they defeated Cornell 5-2 and 4-1. Although the Tigers scored five runs in the first game, the score was tied 1-1 until junior pitcher Mike Ford knocked a grand slam to right field in the bottom of the 10th inning. Ford also tossed 10 innings of outstanding baseball, limiting Cornell to only one run on seven hits throughout the game and finishing his season with a perfect 6-0 record.

“Mike Ford was the story in the first game today,” Bradley said Sunday. “We weren’t doing a whole lot until the 10th inning. We got some guys on, and Mike took care of business himself with the grand slam.”

The Tigers followed their early victory with another win in game two, in which freshman pitcher Cam Mingo threw seven innings of shutout ball, limiting the Big Red to only five hits and striking out five. The game was scoreless until the sixth inning, when the Tigers picked up two runs on wild pitches and scored another run when junior centerfielder Alec Keller’s sac fly drove senior left fielder Nate Baird in from third.

Despite the losses on Friday that eliminated Princeton from playoff contention, the Tigers still recognize their season’s many positive aspects.

“We had a great group of seniors, we pitched really well and we lost an inordinate number of close ball games,” Bradley said. “We lost 11 or 12 one-run games, and it’s hard to look back at it. But we’ll look back at the year with a lot of positives, not a what-could-have-been scenario.”