Mother Nature Delays Baseball Title Series

And this is supposed to be the sunny month of May?

Heavy rains all along the East Coast this weekend forced the postponement of the Ivy League Championship Series, scheduled as a weekend best-of-three hosted by Princeton.

Incessant rain made the Tigers' Clarke Field unplayable, and with no letup in sight, league officials switched the games to a neutral location, New Haven's Yale Field, and slated them for tomorrow and Wednesday.

So a day the Crimson (30-10, 16-4 Ivy) expected to spend polishing its second straight league championship trophy was instead devoted to dodging puddles on Cambridge's cobblestones and waiting impatiently to put its No. 1 New England ranking on the line against the Lou Gehrig division's Tigers (24-12, 13-7).

At press time, the Tuesday-Wednesday setup was still tentative, and even if Mother Nature obliges this time around, provisions may be required to accommodate the NCAA play-in that will follow.

The winner of the Harvard-Princeton series will host the winner of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference's (MAAC) tournament, which will be decided with a nine-inning matchup this afternoon between Marist and LeMoyne.

MACC officials, similarly besieged by inclement weather, converted their four-team, double-elimination tournament to a single-elimination bracket whose semifinal round was played today.

The play-in, scheduled for Thursday and Friday at the home of the Ivy champions, may also be pushed back to the weekend to allow the hosts a rest day should the championship go the full three games.