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Aiming to duplicate last weekend’s series victory at Penn, the baseball team (9-23, 4-8 Ivy) will host Columbia (10-22, 6-10 Ivy) this weekend for a pair of doubleheaders on Hoy Field. Cornell enters weekend playing some of its best baseball of the season. After splitting Wednesday’s doubleheader at home against LeMoyne, the Red has now won five of its last seven games, including a three-game winning streak in Ivy League play. Pitching has been the key to this recent hot streak, as the Red’s staff has turned around its lackluster early-season performance in recent games. After the Red began the season with a 8.00 team ERA, opponents have been able to only manage 2.86 runs per game against Cornell in its last seven contests. “It’s what we have expected from them,” said head coach Tom Ford. “They’ve been staying aggressive and getting ahead in the count.” The recent LeMoyne doubleheader continued this trend as the Red’s hurlers held the Dolphins to just six runs in the two games. Freshman Blake Hamilton (1-2), in his first collegiate start, was given the nod in the first game and did not disappoint, getting the win after giving up just three hits and two runs in his four innings of work. Meanwhile, in the second game, Hamilton’s classmate Trevor Vieweg (1-1) started the game a little rocky, allowing four runs in 2 2/3 innings, but the bullpen came on strong to keep the Red close. Seniors Dan Baysinger, Luke Staskal, Dan Gala and sophomore Rocky Collis will try to continue Cornell’s pitching dominance, as they get the starting nods against Columbia this weekend. Collis will be making his first appearance since pulling his groin earlier in the season. While Cornell’s pitching issues have become less and less prevalent, question marks about its offense still remain. At times, producing runs has not been a problem for the Red’s lineup — last weekend the Cornell batsman scored 15 runs in back-to-back games against the Quakers, while the week before that, they crossed the plate 17 times during a doubleheader at Brown. However, consistency still remains a looming issue, as seen in the team’s inability to score more than four runs in the two games against LeMoyne. The Red will have a perfect opportunity to put all those hitting woes behind it, as it goes up against a Lions’ pitching staff that has been struggling as of late. With combined season ERA of 7.29, the Colombia pitchers have been even less effective in the team’s most recent games. Over their last seven games, opponents have averaged 10.6 runs per game against the Lions, including one doubleheader in which Columbia gave up 33 runs to Princeton. Though their pitching has had difficulties throughout the season, offensively, Columbia has been moderately successful. Led by upperclassmen Fernando Perez and Steve Compton, the team’s leaders in average, RBI and total bases, the Lions’ have managed to plate about 5.2 runs per game. “I know its an old clich
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After getting its first two Ivy wins of the season last weekend, the women’s lacrosse team aims to up its conference record to .500 when it faces off against No. 14 Yale (11-4, 4-2 Ivy) tomorrow at Schoellkopf Field at 1 p.m. The Red (3-8, 2-3 Ivy) can spoil the Bulldogs’ hopes of getting an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament by getting the upset. Cornell snapped a five-game losing streak last Friday with an 11-9 win at Brown, buoyed by hat tricks from juniors Lindsay Steinberg and Kristen Smith. The Red’s game on Sunday against Columbia was interrupted near the end of the first half due to lightning. When play resumed, the Lions mounted a comeback in the second half, but Cornell held on for the 10-8 win. Senior co-captain Jaime Quinn recorded four points on the day, while freshman Lindsey Moore came off the bench to net two goals and an assist. This weekend, the Red will need to shut down Yale’s prolific offense, which is averaging 12.53 goals per game. “Yale has three really significant scoring threats, and two of the three are very tall, one is six foot tall and the other is 5-11,” said head coach Jenny Graap ’86. “In preparing for [Yale], we’re trying to get our defense ready for denying some of these feeds to the tall girls inside and lots of communication on the defensive end so that we can be really solid in our effort in the backfield.” The trio of Miles Whitman, Sophie Melniker, and Katherine Sargent has combined for 135 of the Yale’s 188 goals this season. Melniker is the reigning Ivy League Player of the Week after scoring 16 goals in Yale’s three games last weekend. The Red has struggled in the past few games in shutting down its opponents’ fast break scoring chances, which it will need to do tomorrow if it hopes to win. “Yale does play a fast break transition offense at times, and so definitely we have been working on that, stopping the team’s fast break off of the draw control, off of a clear, or any broken situation,” Graap said. ” Yale actually has one of the fastest players in the country in their leading scorer, Miles Whitman. She’s wicked fast.” Whitman is the fourth leading scorer in the nation as of last weekend, and has recorded 52 goals and 26 assists on the year. Last year against the Red, Whitman found the back of the net seven times in the Bulldogs’ 11-5 win. Shutting down Whitman will not be enough, as Sargent and Melniker are also big threats in the attacking end. ” Yale presents multiple challenges, so I think it’s going to take a whole team effort in the backfield to contain those players,” Graap said. ” Just like in any game, there’s just one ball so you just have to figure out how you can get multiple defenders on the ball without leaving dangerous people wide open. It’s a matter of shifting and adjusting and working together.” With four games left in the season, the Red has a chance to end the spring on a positive note by extending its winning streak. ” I think for us to have a great showing against all the remaining teams would be wonderful. By the eleventh, twelfth game of the season, the freshmen that have been playing for us and even the upperclassmen who are first-time starters, they’re not so young anymore because of all the games we’ve played and all the experience they’ve had. We need to show in the remaining four games what we’ve learned,” Graap said. Archived article by Jonathan Auerbach