Last-inning homers send Cornell home in twinbill sweep

Senior Day for the Harvard baseball team isn’t until the end of the month, but that didn’t stop the Crimson’s elder statesmen from stealing the spotlight in Saturday’s doubleheader against Cornell at O’Donnell Field.

Captain Harry Douglas came through with key hits in the final inning of each game, Matt Rogers continued his recent run of scorching play with a pair of long balls, and Taylor Meehan and Tom Stack-Babich each hit walk-off homers in a thrilling sweep of the Big Red (4-16, 2-6 Ivy).

Meehan capped off a five-run ninth with a two-run shot in Game 1 to bring Harvard all the way back from a 5-1 deficit and give the team a 6-5 victory.

Stack-Babich took his classmate’s cue in the nightcap—stepping up to the plate with the score tied at five and a man on base in the bottom of the ninth and hammering the ball over the centerfield fence to complete the sweep with a 7-5 Harvard win.

“Oh, was it exciting,” said an ecstatic Crimson coach Joe Walsh. “It’s nice to see two comebacks. We were down a bundle of runs in both games...but] we honed in there and hit them late.”

HARVARD 7, CORNELL 5

After the Crimson came all the way back from a 4-0 hole with five runs in the bottom of the seventh inning, the Big Red reclaimed the momentum in the seventh when third baseman Nathan Ford smashed a game-tying home run the opposite way to right field off of Harvard freshman reliever Jonah Klees.

But if Cornell had any ideas of taking the contest into extra innings, Stack-Babich had other plans.

The right fielder stepped into the batter’s box after Douglas laced a two-out single through the left side of the infield to keep the Crimson at the plate. Stack-Babich took full advantage of the opportunity, crushing a towering home run out to center field to give Harvard its second walk-off win of the day.

“It was good that we won right way,” Stack-Babich said. “You’re kind of down after [losing the lead in the ninth], and you don’t want to hang around for too long.”

The game started off as a pitcher’s duel between Harvard rookie Conner Hulse and the Big Red’s Matt Hill, who maintained a scoreless battle through five innings. Hulse relented in the sixth, giving up three runs, two of which came off a Domenic DiRicco homer. Cornell picked up another run in the seventh to take a 4-0 lead.

But the Crimson bats woke up in the bottom of the frame in a big way, on the strength of a power surge from Harvard’s top two sluggers.

With the Crimson down 4-1, Rogers came up to the plate with a runner on base and blasted a shot through an antagonistic wind in left field. Two batters later, Stack-Babich followed suit with a tape-measure long ball out to left center for his first homer of the game, giving the Crimson a 5-4 advantage.

Ford almost stole the show with his ninth-inning dinger, but Stack-Babich one-upped him in the bottom of the frame to cap off an outstanding day for him and his classmates.

“Seeing our seniors come through that way, that’s a real strength for your ballclub when your seniors can come up big like that,” Walsh said. “I hope that carries on to the rest of the classes.”

HARVARD 6, CORNELL 5

The flair for the dramatic that the Crimson displayed on Saturday first manifested itself in the seventh and final inning of Game 1 against the Big Red.

Down 5-1 after a sixth-inning Rogers homer got the team on the board, Harvard looked to be in dire straits coming into last licks. But the Cornell defense fell apart early in the inning, giving the Crimson all the help it needed to mount an impressive comeback.

Three Big Red errors and timely run-scoring singles by senior Jon Roberts and sophomore Dillon O’Neill brought Harvard within two and the winning run to the plate in Meehan.

While Meehan’s contributions to the Crimson’s efforts throughout his career have predominantly been his high batting average and on-base percentage, as well as his solid defense at second base, on Saturday he eschewed his usual weapons of choice in favor of the long ball. On a 2-1 pitch from Cornell’s David Rochefort, the lefty Meehan pulled the ball deep to right field and out of the park for Harvard’s first of two walk-off shots on the day.

“That was huge,” Stack-Babich said. “Especially in the first game to get some momentum. We really needed that.”

—Staff writer Loren Amor can be reached at lamor@fas.harvard.edu.