Baseball | Penn's killer G's hitting the spot

With only one senior on the roster, Penn baseball needed some juniors to step up this season.

Say hello to Tom Grandieri and Will Gordon.

Both of them have taken on leadership roles this season and have batted tremendously thus far.

Grandieri is hitting .369 with four home runs and an Ivy League-leading 25 runs batted in. Meanwhile, Gordon leads the conference with six home runs this season.

"If I'm called on to step up, I need to do that," Grandieri said. "We have a bunch of guys on the team who have been doing a pretty good job offensively."

While the two Gs - Gordon and Grandieri - have played well recently, Penn is on a five-game losing streak that can not be attributed to a lack of scoring runs (they've driven home 6.8 per game in that span). On the contrary, the team has given up 11.4 runs per game during the streak.

Tomorrow, Penn (10-12, 0-4 Ivy) will travel to Providence, R.I., to face Brown (7-11-1, 3-1) in a doubleheader. The Quakers will then play Sunday against Yale (6-10, 2-2) in another doubleheader in New Haven, Conn.

"They're both good ball clubs," Grandieri said of the Bears and Bulldogs. "Every Ivy League team we play is going to be tough."

All four games are crucial to the Quakers' Ivy League success this season. Because the team started the season at 0-4 in the conference, Penn desperately needs to win some games this weekend to launch itself back into Ivy League title contention.

"Really, we can't go 2-2 this weekend," freshman Chris McNulty said after the team's loss to Delaware Tuesday. "We got to have a winning series or else we're going to be in trouble."

During the recent funk, Penn has been in position to win some of the games, especially against Dartmouth and Harvard this past week.

Penn was up 8-3 against Dartmouth Saturday after four innings and went on to lose 14-8. On Monday, Penn led Harvard 11-6 with only three innings left to play before losing in extra innings, 15-11.

"We let those games slip away from us," Gordon said. "If we can keep games under control in late-game situations and keep hitting the ball like we did in Florida, then I think we'll be fine."

Coach John Cole has not announced who will be the starting pitchers for this weekend's games.

"We don't really have a set rotation anymore," Gordon said. "We usually see Todd Roth and Paul Cusick, but it wouldn't surprise me to see coach mix it up a little bit."

On Tuesday against Delaware, Penn gave up nine runs in the seventh inning en route to a 13-5 loss.

That inning was just one of many recently in which the Quakers have yielded a large number of runs to their opponent, putting games out of reach.

"That has been our kryptonite lately," Grandieri said. "Avoiding the big-run inning is definitely a key to this weekend."

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