In the season's final weekend, Penn baseball was unable to hold on to a lead -- a problem that has plagued the team all year.
The Quakers (11-26, 7-13 Ivy) fell to Cornell (15-16, 9-7) in all four games in Ithaca, N.Y. They lost 13-1 and 5-1 on Saturday and 7-1 and 2-1 the next day.
Sunday's finale marked the 1,234th and final game for coach Bob Seddon, who will retire after 34 years, and also the last for assistant Bill Wagner who has been with the team for three decades.
"It's disappointing for all of the coaches," Seddon said. "They just didn't get it done. We should have done better."
Penn's losses come at the end of a heartbreaking season marked by the team's habitual breakdowns while leading late in the game.
In the final game of the series, the Quakers did just that, blowing a one-run lead in the bottom of the ninth.
Freshman Nick Francona started the game with six scoreless innings and six strikeouts. His classmate Steven Schwartz picked up where Francona left off, holding off the Big Red for two more innings.
With his team clinging to a 1-0 lead, another freshman, Andy Console, came in to try and get the save, but the Big Red had other ideas. Cornell's own freshman, right fielder Brian Kaufman, stepped to the plate with two men on and ended the game with a double.
It was the 11th time this year that the Quakers had lost a game by two runs or fewer.
"It all came down to losing a lot of one- and two-run games," Seddon said. "We basically couldn't close out games when we were winning."
However, the entire last inning's pressure-filled situation could have been avoided if Penn was able to generate any type of offense. The most glaring similarity between all of the weekend's games was the dismal offensive support that Penn's pitchers received.
"We didn't hit at all the whole weekend," Seddon said. "It was a total drought."
The Quakers' lone bright spot on the offensive side was senior center fielder Nate Moffie, who hit consistently throughout the series. He exploded in Sunday's first game, going 3-for-4 with two doubles in the losing effort.
Moffie finished the last season of his Penn career with 49 hits, giving him a total of 183 during his four years, enough to move him into second place on the Quakers' all-time list.
Penn also faltered on defense against Cornell, making three to four errors per game and not executing on routine plays.
"We continued to not make plays, and that was our undoing," Seddon said. "They got some timely hits, but we just gave them the rest of the runs. We really didn't play very good baseball."
Things have looked grim for the Quakers since their second doubleheader against Princeton April 16. The two losses to the Tigers sent the Quakers on another slide -- this time eight games -- to end the year. Penn has had three stretches where it dropped at least seven consecutive games.
Penn also lost 14 of its last 17. Those games were certainly the most important of the season, as most went toward determining the winner of the Ivy League's Lou Gehrig Division.
If the Quakers had fared better in their final series, they still would have had a good chance to take the division crown. Princeton had led the division until it dropped three of four to Columbia last weekend and allowed Cornell to sneak into first place by one game.
The Big Red and the Tigers begin a four-game set on Friday that will determine the division champion.
A division title would have been the perfect way for Seddon to leave Penn. But it seems like the Quakers will just have to rely on the incoming fresh faces, including new coach John Cole, to get them their first Ivy League title since 1995.
