In his Ivy League debut, freshman pitcher John Beasley capped a great weekend for Penn baseball with a near-perfect outing.
Entering the final game of a four game stand with Princeton, the righthander had a no-hitter after five innings and gave up only one hit through seven before being pulled in the eighth.
And it couldn’t have come at a better time for the Quakers, who entered the weekend in a tight race with Columbia for first place in the Gherig division.
“Between the first and second game, we found out that Columbia had lost their first game against Cornell,” said Beasley, who now has a 4.82 earned run average. “We knew that in order to make up any ground this weekend, we were going to have to win both games.”
Penn (20-17, 9-7 Ivy) did just that, beating the Tigers (10-27, 5-11) twice Saturday after splitting Friday’s doubleheader.
“I was very proud of how the team bounced back after the first day,” coach John Cole. “It really was the season on the brink, and we played our best ball of the year [on Saturday].”
In addition to the pitching performance of Beasley in Saturday’s nightcap, the Quakers received a huge boost from starter Chris McNulty in the initial outing.
The sophomore hurler threw a complete game and yielded just one run on five hits to earn his team-leading fourth win of the season.
“We got two good pitching performances on the back end with McNulty and Beasley,” Cole said. “If you can pitch, you have a chance every weekend. In the Cornell series, we didn’t pitch well on the back half of the weekend.”
The Quakers hit above par in all four games. The team averaged a little under 11 runs per game throughout the series.
“We did a great job handling the bat, hit-and-runs, stolen bases, situational bunting.” Cole added.
Senior Tom Grandieri, in particular, had a monster weekend offensively. The senior went 12-for-18 overall with 9 runs scored, 6 runs-batted-in, and 2 home runs.
The biggest disappointment of the weekend, however, was Penn’s inability to earn a win in the first game of the series, which would have brought the team to 10-6 in conference play.
Down four runs going into the sixth inning, the Quakers rallied in the sixth and seventh to tie the game at seven apiece. However, the Tigers struck back in the bottom of the seventh for a walk-off 8-7 victory.
Penn now trails Columbia by two games in the Gehrig Division and will finish the regular season next weekend with a final series against the first-place Lions.
“Next weekend is the season for us,” Cole said.
“We don’t have a mid-week game this week, so we’re going to be focused more on practice,” Beasley said. “We have a lot of motivation because it’s really defined what we’re playing for this weekend.”
The Quakers will host Columbia for a doubleheader on Friday before both teams travel to New York on Saturday for a second doubleheader.
They will need to pull off wins in three outings of the four-game series if they want to bring the Gehrig division pennant back to Philadelphia.
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