A Wild Ivy Baseball Tournament

TigerBlog was right, unfortunately, in his Ivy League baseball tournament prediction.

He said that the ultimate winner of the event would be one of the two teams who won on Day 1, and that's how it turned out. 

In the beginning, the two teams who won their first games were Cornell (over Princeton) and Penn (over Columbia). In the end, it was Penn over Cornell in Game 6 and Game 7, going the distance for an ILT repeat for the Quakers.

It's nearly impossible in baseball to lose your first game in a double-elimination event and have enough pitching to come all the way back. The numbers clearly support that.

If you look at the last two years of NCAA regionals, you have 64 teams who lost their first game. How many of those teams ended up winning and advancing to the Super Regionals? 

That would be one. 

In 2022, none of the 32 teams who lost Game 1 advanced. A year ago, 31 of the 32 did not. Who did? Southern Miss.

And whom did Southern Miss beat twice to get through? Penn.

TB was right about the fact that the teams that won Game 1 would meet in the final. He was, of course, wrong in his assumption that the final would take place at Columbia.

If you missed this, the Lions were the top seed and therefore the host. At the same time, last week was very, very rainy in these parts, and field maintenance issues forced the tournament to be relocated to Montclair State University's Yogi Berra Stadium.

By the way, if you think of Yogi Berra as just a comical figure, did you know that he was wounded on Omaha Beach on D-Day? 

As for Princeton in the Ivy tournament, the Tigers opened with a 9-7 loss to Cornell, way back when at Columbia. The Big Red had a 7-2 lead before Princeton tied it, only to see Cornell come back and score two late runs for the win.

Not that Princeton was hurting for clutch hits in that game. Matt Scannell and Kyle Vinci both hit massive home runs, and Jake Kernodle tied it in the seventh with a two-out double. 

Now facing elimination, Princeton gave the ball to Jacob Faulkner, a unanimous first-team All-Ivy pitcher. The task was to stay alive by taking down Columbia, who had won the league title by five full games over the second-place Tigers.

It's a challenge for a coach who has one ace pitcher to know what the perfect time to use him is, when to get him out, when to let him go, how to rest everyone else. It's not an easy choice. You could make a case for not starting Faulkner at all, because you're limiting him in all likelihood to one appearance, but if you don't start him in an elimination game, then you may never use him at all.

Princeton coach Scott Bradley has taken the Tigers to multiple NCAA tournaments in his long career. He certainly knows what he's doing. This might have been his best coaching job, given all of the injuries, especially to his pitching staff, that he had to juggle all year. 

His decision was to start his ace in Game 2, and Faulkner responded by going all nine innings for the first time in his career, allowing three earned runs in a 16-6 win while improving to 8-1 on the year, with four saves as well. Kernodle and Caden Shapiro both homered in the game, which was a Princeton celebration start to finish.

You can see for yourself:

Columbia, 17-4 during the league season, was the first team out.

The second game Saturday was supposed to be the winners' bracket game between Penn and Cornell, and Princeton was to face the loser of that one. What happened next was quite surprising.

Instead of having a second game Saturday at Columbia, the Penn-Cornell game was scrapped — and then Montclair State became the sight for the rest of the games. Cornell beat Penn, and then Penn came right back to eliminate Princeton 9-4. Scannell and Shaprio both hit another home run, but the Quakers rallied for three runs in the seventh and three in the eighth to take it.

In the end, Penn would advance, beating Cornell twice Monday.

TigerBlog had the right winning scenario. He would never have imagined the right location for it. 

As for the Tigers, they gave, as Pete Carril often said, "a good account of themselves" as they fought to the last out of the last inning. 

And, of course, that's all you can ask.