The Bad News Quakers

• TWEET
• SHARE
• SHARE

I attended my first Penn baseball games of the year this weekend, and all I can is "yuck."

The Quakers lost three out of four (the one game I missed was the win) to Cornell in miserable fashion. Penn was outscored 56-25 by a Big Red squad that had just five wins all season coming into this weekend.

Now, I wasn't surprised by the fact that Penn lost. Heck, I wasn't even surprised that they lost by such a huge margin.

No, what really got to me about the baseball team was just how many errors they made. In total, they committed 12 on the weekend.

At times, this team looked worse that my Little League team that went 0-26 one year. Players were crashing into each other when going for fly balls, letting grounders slip between their legs and letting baserunners get out of run-downs.

And this lack of fundamentals has been a problem for the Quakers all season. They now have 91 errors on the year. The next-worst team in the league is Columbia, which has only 64.

Last year, Princeton had the most errors on the season -- 88.

Any way you look at it, this is flat out embarassing.

If Penn was losing games because its batters couldn't hit far enough or its pitchers couldn't throw hard enough, that would be understandable. After all, former coach Bob Seddon left this program with a dearth of talent.

But you don't need to be that talented to call off a teammate on a fly ball. Even the least-talented of teams has no excuse for being anything short of fundamentally sound.

Baseball is the one sport where your opponent can't really cause you to make errors. Nobody defends you as you try to make a catch or throw.

And let's not forget that this team might not have the best players in the league, but every player was pretty darn good in high school. Every player on Penn made was able to get recruited to play Division I baseball because they didn't make these types of mistakes.

It's unreasonable to demand that Penn win more games. But even if it keeps losing, the team should stop doing it in such an embarassing way.