Mound Dominance Propels Softball Team

Coming into the year, it looked like the TBS show to best describe the Harvard softball rotation was “Meet the Browns.”

These days, to the rest of the league, it’s a lot more like “House of Payne.”

At the start of the season, junior Rachel Brown was expected to put up MVP-caliber numbers and make a serious bid of any number of awards.

But the Crimson rotation isn’t a one-pony show anymore. Freshman Laura Ricciardone has put some stellar numbers of her own. Together, the two form what is probably the most formidable one-two punch on the mound in the Ancient Eight.

After the first weekend of Ivy League play, Brown sits at 11-4 with 11 complete games, 178 strikeouts, and a 1.69 ERA.

Ricciardone isn’t the same power pitcher that her teammate is. But she holds a 1.91 ERA, and her 6-3 record would be much higher had she gotten more offensive support in some of her starts.

If the two can hold form—Brown has actually performed better at the start of Ivy League play in years past—there won’t be much stopping them on the way to the Ivy League finals.

In the South Division, Cornell holds the top spot. As in 2010, the league looks like a match race, and barring injuries or some major upsets, we can expect a finals rematch between the Crimson and the Big Red.

This weekend’s doubleheader is the first time that the two teams will meet. More notably, the two-game set will likely feature the best head-to-head matchup the Ivy League has to offer.

Harvard might have the best one-two rotation, but Cornell senior Elizabeth Dalrymple is, at the moment, the class of the Ancient Eight. With a 0.77 ERA, she has been nothing short of dominant. Like Ricciardone, her 8-3 record is as low as it is only because of poor offensive showings early in the year.

For all of Harvard’s successes on the mound, it hasn’t been the same story at the plate. In all 10 of the team’s losses, the team has scored no more than four runs.

Even in five of its wins, the Crimson has scored two runs of fewer, and both Brown and Ricciardone have picked up losses in games that they otherwise pitched well.

Harvard has only scored a double-digit number of runs three times this year, including twice last week against a lowly Rhode Island team that came out of its doubleheader against Harvard with a 1-21 record.

The only other offensive burst for Harvard came in a blowout against Penn on Saturday, when the team won, 10-0. But the Quakers only lost the first game by a count of 2-1. The team has yet to reach the consistency that it would like to find as it moves into the heart of Ivy play.

Timeliness has been the Crimson’s biggest problem at the plate. The team is putting up solid numbers, and four of its starters are hitting above .300, including captain Ellen Macadam, who is hovering around a .450 batting average. Power numbers are a little down, especially for junior Whitney Shaw, who has hit just four this year.

But over the course of the year, the team is consistently leaving runners on base and missing opportunities to open up larger leads.

At the dish, freshman third baseman Kasey Lange is the biggest addition to the team—what classmate Ricciardone has been on the mound, Lange has been with the bat. Lange is second on the team in batting average, hitting .366, and leads in the team in doubles and RBIs.

For the Crimson, the strength of the rotation is clear. Assuming Brown and Ricciardone maintain their form and poise on the rubber, they’ll anchor the team as it looks to win the North Division.

As the old saying goes, pitching wins championships. But Harvard will need its lineup to get more timely hits if it wants to avoid a few bumps along the way.

—Staff writer E. Benjamin Samuels can be reached at samuels@college.harvard.edu.