Sports
While you could call it an oh-so-close season for the Dartmouth baseball team, falling just one game shy of the three-time defending Red Rolfe Division champion Yale, as Dartmouth baseball seasons go, this one was a gem.
Now two weeks since wrapping up the season, Coach Bob Whalen has much to be thankful for.
The team finished 12-8 in the Ivies and 19-17 overall, its first mark over .500 since Whalen took over five years ago.
Even though the team once again finished second-fiddle to the Bulldogs, Whalen is still ecstatic, proud of the job his players did this year.
"It usually takes me a couple weeks to decompress a little bit -- you put so much into the year every day, whether it's for practice or whatever, but ... this has been a great year," he said.
"We're that much better this year than last year [by three games] and that is after having come off a year in which we thought we made ... tremendous strides from the year before."
"That alone has made [this year] very gratifying," Whalen continued.
The Big Green diamonders finished second to Yale in 1994 as well, with a 9-11 record, but that year the Bulldogs ran away with the title, five games ahead of Dartmouth.
This year, it came down to only one game for the sluggers, and depending on how you look at it, only one out.
In the second of a four-game series with Yale in April, the Dartmouth nine, after coming from behind to take the lead late in the game, let it slip away in the final frame despite retiring the first two batters of the inning.
"People have a tendency to look at the Yale game," Whalen said.
