PRINCETON, N.J. - Sophomore pitcher Robbie Seymour entered the weekend giving up over a run every inning, but Penn coach John Cole was still trying to turn him into a starter. Cole reaped the benefits of his persistence yesterday, and the Quakers stuck around in the Ivy League title race a bit longer as a result.
Seymour threw nearly seven innings of three-run baseball in the second game of yesterday's doubleheader at Princeton, allowing the Quakers to post a 5-4 win in that game after a 10-7 win in game one.
That's the good news for Penn. The bad is that Princeton took both Saturday games, 5-2 and 1-0, which puts the Quakers in a precarious position. They must win all four next weekend against Gehrig Division-leading Columbia and then hope for help from Cornell (at least a 2-2 split) when it faces the Tigers. Even then, Penn would still have to win one more game, an extra-inning contest against Yale that was suspended last month.
"We put ourselves behind the 8-ball," Cole said. "Columbia's kind of out in front . we know it's a long shot."
But had the Quakers (14-18, 6-9 Ivy) not salvaged a split against the Tigers (16-20, 8-8), that long shot would have become no shot at all.
Knowing that much, Cole sent Seymour to the mound for his first start of the year. (Freshman hurler Jeremy Maas, who usually starts on weekends, was injured.)
From the start, the Tigers got runners on base, but they had trouble advancing them and would leave 11 stranded by game's end.
"I got my fastball over the plate, which was pretty helpful," Seymour said. "And they still hit the ball hard."
Seymour scattered six hits in his first six innings and only ran into trouble in the seventh, when a walk, single and double scored two Princeton runs and tied the score at three. With the go-ahead run on base, Cole left Seymour in to face switch-hitting catcher Jack Murphy, who entered the series batting .397 with six homers. When Murphy walked, Cole brought in senior Andy Console, who had thrown 1.2 innings in game one.
Console got a break when a wild pitch to the next batter went into the stands; had it stayed in bounds, Adrian Turnham likely would have scored all the way from second. Console extinguished the threat by striking out Spencer Lucian on a high heater, and a two-run home run by Dan Williams in the bottom of the inning gave Penn the lead for good.
The Quakers won game one in much less dramatic fashion, taking a 9-1 lead after three innings behind an eight-run outburst in the second. The Quakers scored seven men in a row - against Princeton's ace power pitcher, David Hale, no less.
That beatdown must have been as maddening for Princeton as it was joyous for Penn. The day before, the Quakers had wasted another superb effort from sophomore Todd Roth, who allowed just one run - a homer to Turnham - in a complete game loss. Penn eked out just three hits and no runs.
The Quakers followed that up by dropping game two. Steve Gable, Dan Williams and Matt Toffaletti singled in the sixth to knot the score at 2-2, but the Tigers responded with a double, triple and single to take a 4-2 lead. They tacked on an insurance run in the seventh when Turnham walked, reached second on a wild pitch, advanced to third on a flyout, then scored on a single.
All that meant the Quakers had plenty to think about before they salvaged their season, at least temporarily, on Sunday.
"They showed me some character," Cole said. "They could have rolled over and called it a season."
