The Cornell baseball team (6-13, 2-4 Ivy) heads into this weekend without many recent successes to build on. The squad has dropped its last five contests and seven of its last eight. In those eight games, a 3-1 win over Harvard marks the only game in which opponents have been held to single digits. But as the weather improves, so can the Red.
Tomorrow and Sunday will be pivotal dates on Cornell’s schedule, as Penn (16-9, 3-5 Ivy) will visit Hoy Field for a pair of noontime doubleheaders.
Although the Quakers are the only Ancient Eight squad with an overall winning record, they are third in the Gehrig Division, tied with the Red and two games behind division co-leaders Princeton and Columbia.
Tomorrow will be the first division action both teams see this season. Both Penn and Cornell will be hungry to jump back to the top of the standings. And both teams know that a poor showing this weekend effectively ends an Ivy title bid.
The Red will have to rebound from a difficult Tuesday twinbill against Binghamton in which it lost both ends, 13-8 and 10-3. On the flip-side, the Quakers enter the game on a three-game winning streak during which they have reached the 10-run plateau in all three matches.
Their most recent victory was a 10-3 drubbing of La Salle on Tuesday. A Wednesday contest with St. Peter’s was washed out and rescheduled.
Penn will likely throw staff ace Andrew McCreery at Cornell during the weekend. McCreery is coming off a 10-0 no-hitter against Yale in the first game of a doubleheader last Sunday.
At the plate, the Red will have to be careful with Chris May, who tops the Quakers in just about every hitting category, including average (.462), homers (6), and RBI (37). McCreery is a threat offensively as well.
Elsewhere in the Ancient Eight
Division leaders Princeton and Columbia are also playing a pair of twinbills this weekend, and so the Gehrig Division standings have the potential to be shuffled completely. The possibility exists for Cornell to be either in first place or last place when the dust has lifted on Sunday evening.
Ordinarily, Cornell would have only divisional opponents for the rest of its Ivy schedule, but a home doubleheader with Brown had to be rescheduled due to inclement weather during the last week of March. An additional result of this is that the Red has a pair of games in hand coming down the stretch.
Archived article by Alex Fineman