THE PROMISED LANDE: One Bad Day Means More in Ivy League

One bad day.

Five bad hours.

Fifteen bad innings.

That’s all it took for the advantage of a 7-1 league start to be wiped clean away in an ugly day of baseball in New Haven on Saturday.

Just one bad day.

Because that’s really all it was. There are lots of excuses and reasons and hypotheses as to why Harvard—on a seven-game Ivy win streak—would stumble the way it did at Yale Field.

Sure, the Crimson was without its best hitter, Trey Hendricks, who was suffering from back spasms and could hardly walk before the first pitch of the doubleheader. And yeah, the team’s starting shortstop Morgan Brown was out after pulling a quadricep during Friday’s loss to Boston College.

But even key personnel losses don’t account for seven errors in two games.

It was just one bad day.

And Yale—which had dropped seven of its last eight games to Harvard—was coming off a 3-1 weekend that included a victory over Tigers’ ace Ross Ohlendorf. They had momentum and confidence and were ready to finally make waves in the Ivy League.

“Hitting has been [Harvard’s] motor all season,” pitcher Mike Mongiardini told the Yale Daily News leading up to the game. “But I think we’ve got the pitching to stop them.”

And Saturday, it looked like he may have been right. Yale’s starters were stellar and Harvard mustered only three runs on 10 hits in both games combined.

But he wasn’t right.

It was just one bad day.

And for most college baseball teams, one bad day isn’t all that bad. You come out flat, hit some deep flies into a strong wind, slide into a collective slump and lose to a team you have no business losing to.

But you know what happens next? You go home. Or to a hotel. And you calm down, make adjustments, take some deep breaths and remind yourself that one bad day isn’t going to decide your season. It’s a long year, and it’s just one game out of 60.

But the Harvard baseball team can’t do that.

Saturday was, by all accounts, just one bad day, but unfortunately it has to be more than that, too.

Saturday was one-tenth of the Ivy League season and one-sixth of the division schedule.

Saturday was enough to start the season over again. The Crimson began the day a game up on Brown and Dartmouth in the Red Rolfe standings, and it concluded it in a four-way tie for first place at 7-3. The too-short Ivy League season was all of a sudden even shorter, beginning again with only 10 games remaining on the schedule.

Both the Northeast’s wretched weather and the Ivy League’s stringent travel restrictions artificially condense the conference schedule into one month of exhausting play. The early-season swings through the South are in practice just preseason tune-ups, used to find a fourth starter and actually see some live pitching for the first time in six months. In a league where it’s virtually impossible for a team to receive an at-large berth to the NCAA tournament, none of that matters.

The real season is only one month long, and all of a sudden one bad day becomes a lot more than it should be in the game of baseball.

I guess that’s the price you have to pay for playing in a league where you face aces named Josh—instead of Jeremy—Sowers and graduate with a degree that could earn you big-league dollars even if you’re never drafted. But sometimes, when you’re used to seasons that stretch on forever, it doesn’t feel much like baseball.

The Crimson pulled it together to split a pair yesterday, and now stands one game behind division-leading Dartmouth. It looks like it will once again come down to the season’s final weekend, the home-and-home series between the Crimson and the Big Green.

No matter how the season begins, it always comes down to that last doubleheader.

The smart money says it won’t be another bad day.

—Staff writer Lande A. Spottswood can be reached at spottsw@fas.harvard.edu.