With the pressure of the season weighing down on the closing weeks of Ivy League play, Dartmouth baseball is locked in a dogfight with Yale University for the Red Rolfe Division crown. The Big Green (12-19, 7-9 Ivy) sits two games back from the Bulldogs (17-19, 9-7 Ivy) after splitting a pair of doubleheaders against Brown University this weekend.
Dartmouth churned out the span of possible results, dropping the opening matchup 12-3 before losing the second game on Saturday 7-6 in extra innings. An altogether different story unraveled on Sunday when the Big Green shut down the Bears in a 7-0 victory before clinging to a one run lead in the 3-2 win that closed out the games in Rhode Island.
The games came just a little over a week after Brown’s head coach of 18 years Marek Drabinski stepped down, giving no reason for his sudden and unexpected departure, the Brown Daily Herald reported. The following weekend, the Bears picked up their first Ivy victories of the season at Harvard University.
The Bears, co-captain Jeff Keller ’14 said, played like they had nothing to lose.
“They were just having a lot of fun,” co-captain Dustin Selzer ’14 said. “They definitely have some guys who can swing, and they showed us that.”
Brown’s Ivy record since the change of coaching staff has been an even .500, statistics that bode well for the Big Green coming into the final weekend of Ivy League match ups. If the new factor in the Red Rolfe Division can hold up their tendency to split the results on the weekend against Yale, Dartmouth could potentially win the Division if the Big Green could manage a clean sweep of Harvard.
Brown’s lineup put up 12 runs in the first game on Saturday, scoring at least one run in each inning. The Big Green’s starter, Beau Sulser ’16, uncharacteristically surrendered 10 runs against 12 hits in his four and one-thirds innings stretch on the mound. Dartmouth’s offense wouldn’t get on the scoreboard until the fourth inning when a home run by Joe Purritano ’16 brought in Selzer to bring Dartmouth within five. A solo home run by Thomas Roulis ’15 in the fifth was the last Dartmouth run of the game.
When the two teams took the diamond for the second game of Saturday’s doubleheader, neither could manage a clear lead. A four-run effort in the third put Dartmouth ahead 4-2, but two Brown runs in the fifth and seventh each kept pressure on the Big Green offense.
Bo Patterson ’15 worked his way around the diamond twice that game, stealing second and going to third on a throwing error in the sixth before a sacrifice grounder by Matt MacDowell ’15 brought him home.
Patterson again put the team back in contention in the eighth after a failed pick-off attempt gave him time to take second before Matt Parisi ’15 batted him in on a single through the left side of the infield.
The game ran into the 10th when an unearned run snapped the 6-6 tie in favor of the Bears.
Saturday’s results, Selzer said, were some of the most disappointing of his entire career at Dartmouth.
The Big Green had shaken out its late-season jitters when it returned to Brown’s Murray Stadium on Sunday, churning out seven runs in seven innings while shutting out the Bears in the first game of the doubleheader. Mike Concato ’17, taking the place of recovering Michael Danielak ’16, threw 108 pitches and six strikeouts. The four-hit outing, Concato said, resulted from remaining calm and throwing the pitches that he was working for.
With one win on the weekend under their belts, the players entered the final game of the four-game matchup, giving up the first run of the game to the Bears in the third. The altered staff availability in the pen brought Chris England ’15 to the mound for his first Ivy start of the season.
England allowed just two runs on four hits in seven innings, providing the performance the team needed, both Keller and Selzer said.
“Credit today is due to Chris England,” Selzer said. “He was great for having the guts to go out there and start for the team when we needed him. Without a doubt, he stepped up and was a huge asset to the team.”
Two runs for Dartmouth in the sixth and one final home run by Purritano in the eighth — just in time to keep the Big Green ahead before Brown homered in the bottom half — carried the team to a slim victory as Chris Burkholder ’17 and Duncan Robinson ’16 took to the mound to keep the Bears quiet in the box for the final two innings of the game, giving up just one hit between them.
The team will try to build momentum going into the final weekend of Ivy play by taking on St. Anselm College in Hanover on Tuesday at 3:30 p.m.
