IN LEHMAN'S TERMS: Parity Strikes Baseball Ranks

On either Saturday or Sunday, for the first time in Joe Walsh’s 12-year tenure as head coach, a team other than Harvard or Princeton will be crowned as the Ivy League champion.

Let that sink in for a second.

The Crimson, winner of five of the last 11 Ancient Eight titles, closed its season yesterday with a 4-3 win over Northeastern. The Tigers, owners of the league’s other six NCAA berths during that span, finish up today at home against Rider.

Both will be on the sidelines for the Ivy Championship Series this weekend, which pits surprise Gehrig Division champ Penn against Rolfe Division upstart Brown. The Quakers, at 12-8 in Ivy play, finished one game up on Princeton, while Harvard, which also checked in at 12-8, wound up two games back of the Bears.

So the stranglehold that only occasionally seemed in jeopardy during the past decade-plus, when Dartmouth challenged Princeton in 2000, 2001, and 2004, or when Cornell met Harvard in the ’05 ICS, is now suddenly and officially kaput.

It’s more than providence, though, that brings the last two Ivy teams standing to Providence on Saturday. It’s parity. From the opening league weekend, 2007 had a different feel—call it the absence of inevitability—than years past.

The Crimson arrived in Philadelphia for a doubleheader with Penn fresh off a spring break road trip that had exposed the lack of pop in the middle of its order, the lack of experience in its starting rotation, and the lack of reliable firemen in its bullpen. Those shortcomings didn’t seem to matter in the opening game, as freshman Max Perlman cruised to his first career Ivy win.

Then a funny thing happened in the second game. Quakers rookie Jim Birmingham threw seven innings of no-hit ball and the team’s leadoff hitter spanked a Shawn Haviland curveball for a three-run dinger to give Penn, which had finished 7-13 in the Ivies for two years running, the split. Haviland, the staff ace and league’s Pitcher of the Year in 2006, allowed twice as many earned runs in that game (six) as he had in all five of his Ivy starts the year before combined.

The next day, the Crimson split again, this time versus perennial doormat Columbia. Princeton also dropped two of four. Games that used to be gimmes are now got-me’s.

“We had eight splits this year,” says Harvard head coach Joe Walsh. “And we had to work hard to get those splits.”

As the other programs devote more and more resources to the increasingly frenzied recruiting circuit, the two stalwarts no longer have a monopoly on the upper echelon of the Ivy-bound crop. Rosters are growing in depth, and young talent has diffused throughout the league.

Birmingham isn’t even the most impressive freshman hurler on the Quakers staff: Todd Roth, with a 6-1 record, 2.24 ERA, and 56 strikeouts in 60 1/3 innings, will likely double up as Rookie and Pitcher of the Year. According to Walsh, Harvard was Roth’s first-choice school, but he did not gain admission. So now he’s playing his trade in Philly.

The most likely candidate to claim Player of the Year honors, Ryan Lavarnway, is a sophomore slugger for Yale. The league’s fourth-leading hitter is Dartmouth frosh Nick Santomauro. A prospect that Walsh coveted from the Class of 2011 is headed to Columbia next season and “[he has] never lost to Columbia on a recruit.”

Harvard wasn’t noticeably worse than the other top teams in the conference—as Walsh puts it, “nobody took two from us, nobody showed they were a better ball club than us on a weekend”—but it wasn’t noticeably better either. Brown and Penn have the stats to back up their showing, ranking 1-2 and 2-3 in the league in hitting and pitching, respectively.

In an academic year in which Princeton and Yale became the fourth and fifth Ivy football champs in the last four years, and in which the Tigers, long the league’s standard in basketball, finished at the bottom of the hoops standings, has parity arrived in baseball as well?

Count Walsh among those who thinks so: “I wouldn’t be surprised if it changes from year to year.”

—Staff writer Jonathan Lehman can be reached at jlehman@fas.harvard.edu.