Baseball Falls to Northeastern in Beanpot Opener

BOSTON—Another year, another Beanpot consolation game.

Northeastern starter Matt Piryk held the Harvard baseball team scoreless through six innings and the Huskies survived a scare in the final three en route to an 8-4 win in the Beanpot Tournament at Fenway Park yesterday.

With the loss, Harvard misses out on the Beanpot championship game for the fourth straight year. The Crimson—who will play UMass in the consolation game next Tuesday—has not won an outright Beanpot title since 1991.

“They hit the ball and we didn’t,” Harvard Coach Joe Walsh said. “We just don’t hit enough as a ball club. I think guys may be forcing it a little bit to get some hits. I just don’t think we’ve got enough of an attack out there.”

After managing just two hits through the first six frames, the Crimson connected for two in its first three at-bats if the seventh. The inning produced two runs and the ninth produced two more, but a controversial call, an even more controversial non-call and a barely foul ball prevented the mini-uprising from developing into anything greater.

First, the controversial call.

With two runners on, two already in and the heart of the Crimson order due up in the seventh inning, Harvard rightfielder Chaney Sheffield made a chancy bid for a two-out hit with a bunt to the third-base side of the mound. Piryk fielded the squibber cleanly and made a quick throw to the bag that arrived the same time as Sheffield.

The first-base umpire ruled Sheffield out, forcing Harvard to settle for just the two runs. The call enraged Harvard assistant coach Matt Hyde, who was coaching first base, and stranded Harvard’s hottest hitter, senior Mark Mager, in the on-deck circle.

“I thought the guy was safe,” Walsh said. “But that’s baseball.”

More controversy followed in the eighth, after sophomore Trey Hendricks lined a one-out double to deep center. It was the third hit of the day for Hendricks and appeared to set the table perfectly for senior Nick Carter, who had moved to DH after lasting just 3.1 innings as Harvard’s starting pitcher.

Piryk quickly baited Carter into a pop up along the first base side. Huskie first baseman Miguel Paquette made the putout in front of the Northeastern dugout—but not, it appeared, without some help from his teammates inside the dugout, who steadied him as he hovered around the top of the steps.

The play could have been flagged for interference. Walsh certainly thought it should have been—the Harvard skipper had an animated argument with the first-base umpire over the non-call, but to no avail.

On a better hitting day, the Crimson might have rendered the incident a non-issue with a clutch two-out hit. But on a day when Crimson went 1-for-9 with two outs, freshman catcher Schuyler Mann was helpless to snap Harvard out of its funk. He lined out to third, leaving Hendricks on second.

“I just don’t think we had enough of an attack out there,” Walsh said.

The Crimson finally chased Piryk in the ninth after senior Javy Lopez singled and sophomore Mickey Kropf walked to start the inning. The Crimson then loaded the bases with no outs when pinch hitter Johann Schneider walked off Northeastern reliever Justin Hedrick.

After sophomore centerfielder Bryan Hale struck out, Sheffield stepped into the box and lined a pitch into the left-field corner for what appeared to be a bases-clearing extra-base hit.

Instead, the ball landed about a foot foul. Sheffield eventually walked to force in Harvard’s third run, but Hedrick got Mager to ground out and then fanned Hendricks to end the game.

“I thought we could have made something happen if that ball had stayed fair,” Walsh said. “We bring the tying run to the plate and who knows?”

Earlier in the game, Carter got off on the wrong foot in his first career start. He gave up a two-run homer to Paquette in the first inning that wrapped around Pesky’s Pole in right field.

Carter flirted with danger again in both the second and third innings, but escaped unscathed both times, thanks partly to a couple of timely pickoff plays. When he allowed two of the first three batters to reach in the fourth, though, Walsh had seen enough.

Carter (0-1) was charged with two earned runs on five hits. He walked six and hit two.

“Carter hasn’t had that many innings; we were hoping to get him going [yesterday],” Walsh said. “We had a chance to get some innings out of him.”

“He came in here as a pitcher and a positional player,” Walsh added. “But because of all the injuries in the infield, he hasn’t had a chance to perform much.”

Senior reliever Mike Dryden pitched out of the fourth-inning jam, but Northeastern pushed across two runs off him in the fifth and three more in the sixth, as Harvard committed a pair of costly errors.

Those defensive lapses came back to bite Harvard, who had been left very little room for error by Piryk (4-0).

The freshman righthander faced just four batters above the minimum through six innings. Hendricks—who, at .325, is Harvard’s leading active hitter—had the Crimson’s only two hits during that span.

“When he’s not swinging at bad pitches, he’s a dangerous four-hole hitter,” Walsh said of Hendricks. “He showed that today.”

Besides Hendricks, Lopez was the only Crimson player to enjoy a multihit game yesterday. Harvard’s team batting average now stands at .242.

“We’ve got to hit the ball better,” Walsh said. “None of our outs were hard outs. They were all routine outs.”

The Crimson returns to action this afternoon, when it faces Boston College at O’Donnell Field at 3 p.m. The Eagles won their Beanpot matchup with UMass yesterday and will play the Huskies in the championship game next Tuesday.