Baseball plummets further with four losses to Tigers

The Quakers fell to 6-27 as rival Princeton swept a pair of doubleheaders at Bower Field. If the Penn baseball team had entertained any thoughts of success this past weekend in a pair of doubleheaders against Princeton, its hopes were dashed early. The Tigers scored four runs in the top of the first inning in the first game on Saturday and left Bower Field a day later with a four-game sweep of the reeling Quakers (6-27, 3-13 Ivy League), 6-2, 4-3, 6-3 and 9-3. Penn has lost eight in a row, and 17 of 18 -- including six games by two runs or fewer. "We, as a team, have underachieved -- there is no way we should be 3-13 in the Ivies," Penn coach Bob Seddon said. "The goal right now is to win a game. We've just gone in the tank since the Harvard loss [18-16 in extra innings on April 2]. The team's heart has been broken. "I hardly can remember the [individual] games because they all have the same tune. But we're not as bad as our record [shows]." In Saturday's first game, the Quakers were in a hole from the outset. A single, a stolen base, a walk and three Princeton doubles put Penn down 4-0 before Quakers starter Sean McDonald recorded an out. McDonald held the Tigers (15-15, 8-4 Ivy League) for the most part for the next six innings, however, hurling his third complete game and adding five strikeouts. But Penn could muster only six hits in support of the junior in a 6-2 loss. Saturday's afternoon contest, however, was an entirely different affair. An RBI single by Penn captain Glen Ambrosius and a towering two-run home run by senior Russ Farscht in the first inning put the Quakers in an unfamiliar position -- holding an early 3-0 lead. Up 3-1 going into the seventh and final inning, it appeared that a Saturday split was in the works. But Princeton scored three runs in its final at-bat to steal a 4-3 victory from its archrival. "It was almost like we sat on the three runs and just accepted the lead, when we could have really put them away," said Farscht, who hit his fourth and fifth home runs of 1999 against Princeton. "Unfortunately, we didn't hold the lead. A couple of balls found the holes for them -- you have to give them credit for getting the clutch hits." While credit does need to be given to a Princeton squad that had been batting only .240 before these four victories, the lack of depth in the Quakers pitching staff played a key role in the weekend's outcome. Five of Princeton's six hits in the 4-3 win came in the last two innings, as Penn starter Matt Hepler appeared to tire. "We have a lot of pitching depth and I think that's what was the difference," said Princeton coach Scott Bradley, who went to his bullpen in three of the four wins. "Coach Seddon doesn't have as much pitching depth as we do and when you play four games, he has to go a little bit longer with his starters than we do." The Penn staff threw three complete games in the four outings and the pitch count for each starter was quite high. With a four-man rotation -- and with Sunday's starters Mike Mattern and Mark Lacerenza each having thrown against Drexel on Wednesday -- at times the Quakers staff seemed to be running on empty. "That's absolutely right," said Seddon when told of the Princeton coach's analysis of how the victories played out. "The second game yesterday was a sin. But that has happened a lot. We had a 3-1 lead in the seventh inning, and Hepler probably got a little tired, and he lost his own game." The first game of yesterday's twinbill did not feature an early Penn lead but was close in the early going nonetheless. Another long home run by Farscht tied the score at one in the second, and Mattern (5-3) held Princeton in check for four frames. The Penn starter faltered in the fifth, walking two Tigers and serving up a three-run home run to Princeton first baseman Matt Evans that landed on the Amtrak tracks in deep left-center. Penn was able to get the tying run to the plate in the sixth but stranded two runners in that frame before losing 6-3. Yesterday's second meeting featured the most anticipated event of the weekend -- the appearance of Princeton's behemoth-like hurler Chris Young. The 6'10" Young, the Ivy League Rookie of the Year in basketball, came in with opposing batters hitting only .120 against him. Appropriately, the first two batters Young faced -- Penn's Kevin McCabe and Jim Mullen -- got a walk and a single, and both scored. Through five innings, Young and Penn's Lacerenza were knotted in a 3-3 duel. The sixth frame, though, proved to be Lacerenza's downfall, and the Quakers' hopes of salvaging even one win from the Tigers vanished. Two walks, an error and three hits led to four unearned Princeton runs and the visitors blew open a close game for a 9-3 victory. Tigers centerfielder Jason Koonin, who walked and scored in this inning, reached base on nine out of 15 at-bats and scored six runs. "[Koonin] got three hits the first game, he drew walks [and] he was on base all the time," Bradley said. "As our leadoff hitter, that's key for us." For the second time in four years, Penn was swept by the Tigers and is now eliminated from the Ivy race. "It hurts to get swept by any team but it was a little more painful here," Farscht said. The senior said that part of the blame for the losses lay in the fact that "our bats were too quiet." Despite a 6-for-13 effort from Ambrosius and a 4-for-14 weekend from Mullen, as a team Penn hit only .240. The Quakers also left 22 men on base -- an indication that the hits were not coming at the right times. "I'll tell you the difference -- we don't hit the ball when it counts," Seddon said after the final loss. "We only got five hits in this game." Seddon also blamed the losses on defense. Despite not committing an error in the first game yesterday -- for only the second time in '99 -- the Quakers committed eight in the other outings, leading to seven unearned runs. "We make the clutch error in big spots," Seddon said. "The ball seems to find the places where we don't want it to go." Four losses was obviously not the result that Penn was looking for -- with respect to both this season and to the team's final Ivy games ever at the 19-year-old Bower Field. A new facility will be ready for play on Murphy Field for the 2000 season. "What's happened is they've lost so much that its so hard for the team to get ignited," Seddon said. "They're just waiting for something to happen -- it doesn't work that way, you've got to make it happen. Their hearts have been broken."

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