It's amazing how a pair of 350-foot home runs can gloss over a shaky pitching performance or a few mistakes in the field.
And so, after not winning on their home field since the middle of April, the Big Green baseball team finally broke the curse on Red Rolfe Field with an 8-7 trimming of Harvard in the second game of Saturday's doubleheader.
The win was only the second for the Big Green in the last 11 tries.
But just as that second game showed how getting a couple of big hits makes the little mistakes easy to forget, the first half of the twinbill, an 8-6 loss, clearly manifested how you end up playing the "what if" game when you don't get those hits.
"When things aren't going well, everything gets magnified," Coach Bob Whalen said. "When you're not scoring runs, every mistake jumps out at you."
The first game could not sum up the problems Dartmouth has repeatedly had over its losing stretch. After keeping Harvard close through six innings, the Crimson exploded for four runs on five hits and a walk in the top of the seventh to extend its lead to 8-2.
Dartmouth assembled a courageous rally of its own in the bottom of the inning. With four runs already across and the bases jammed, Greg Gilmer '96 bounced into a force play at second base for the third out of the inning.
Dartmouth also loaded the bases in the fifth inning but once again could not push any across as Todd Marker '93 flied out to right.
In either situation, one hit could have broken the game wide open for the Big Green, but that one hit has eluded Dartmouth consistently over the past several weeks.
Along with not getting clutch hits, Dartmouth had problems moving its runners in the first game. The Big Green got their lead-off batter on base in each of the first four innings but didn't score once.
"That's been one of our problems among many problems," Joe Tosone '93 said. "When you don't execute properly, things don't often go the way you want them to."
Things finally went the way Dartmouth wanted them to in the second game.
Marker and Gilmer, the goats from game one that made inning-ending outs to leave the bases loaded, suddenly became heroes in game two as each drilled three-run home runs in a seven-run fifth inning for Dartmouth.
Harvard came up with six runs over the final three innings, but the combination of Rick MacDonald '94 and Dave Angeramo '94, while not awe-inspiring, were enough to keep the Crimson bats at bay.
Yesterday in Cambridge, Mass., Harvard and the Big Green played another doubleheader, which the Crimson won by scores of 8-6 and 7-3 respectively. Dartmouth's record moves to 12-17 overall, 6-12 in the Ivy League.
