Inside the Numbers: Harvard baseball wins 20-19

When you hear the score 20-19, you might think of a close, hard-fought football game. Or maybe a basketball game halfway through the first quarter. But a baseball game? How crazy would that be?

Yet when the Harvard baseball team (6-21, 3-5 Ivy) faced off against Princeton (7-20, 5-3) on Sunday, the result was just that. Playing at O’Donnell Field in the second game of a doubleheader, the Crimson outlasted the Tigers in a wild nine innings and walked off in the bottom of the ninth to claim a 20-19 victory. The win was the team’s sixth of the year and third in Ivy League play.

Such an unusual game was filled with appropriately unique stats. Here’s a look at the epic showdown by the numbers.

2: Grand slams, one from sophomore infielder Tanner Anderson in the bottom of the sixth and another the very next inning from Princeton first baseman Mike Ford. Tigers catcher Tyler Servais also belted a grand slam in the first game of the doubleheader.

38: The number of hits in the slugfest, 23 for Harvard and 15 for Princeton. The Crimson’s previous season-high was 14 against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.

9: Errors made in the game, with Harvard committing five and Princeton committing four. Despite the high error total, only six of the game’s 39 runs were unearned.

5: The number of Crimson batters who registered at least three hits. Freshman catcher DJ Link went 4-for-5, and sophomore outfielder Brandon Kregel scored five runs.

11: The number of frames that teams scored in, with all but two coming as multiple-run innings (the high was Princeton’s seven-run second).

20: The number of runs Harvard scored, double its previous season high of 10 versus Cornell last weekend.

19: The number of runs Harvard runs allowed, six more than the season’s previous high of 13 that came just a few hours earlier in the first game of the day against Princeton.

3: Runs Harvard scored in the bottom of the ninth to win the game, all of which came on wild pitches.