Princeton University Athletics
Monday TigerBlog - The Home Run
April 24, 2023 | Tiger Blog
Has there ever been a baseball stadium that opened with back-to-back home runs by the other team?
There has been now. Princeton was a very rude guest in Cornell's brand-new Booth Field. About the only pitch that was safe from the Tigers was the one Mr. Booth threw out to open the new facility.
Matt Scannell and Eric Marasheski got the party started with blasts in the first two at-bats in the new stadium. By the end of the weekend, Princeton had hit 11 in all, running their season total to a program-record 49. Kyle Vinci pushed his single-season record total to 16, and he had himself a 14-RBI weekend.
The Tigers won all three games against Cornell, running their Ivy record to 10-5 with three games left at Yale and home against Brown. The team is very much in the hunt for a spot in the first four-team Ivy tournament, not to mention winning the league title and grabbing the host spot that goes along with that.
The theme of the weekend was the home run, both the literal and figurative type.
The softball team, for instance, hit only one home run over the weekend, so this was more of a figurative "home run," with an emphasis on the "home."
Princeton took two of three from Harvard this weekend at home, which was a big step in the direction of playing more games at home. The Tigers enter the final weekend of the Ivy League season with three at Dartmouth while Harvard hosts Columbia.
Any combination of two Tiger wins or Harvard losses gives the Tigers an Ivy League championship and brings the league tournament to Princeton. Why? Because the two wins over Harvard give Princeton the head-to-head tiebreaker should they end up even.
Speaking of home runs, what can you say about the women's tennis team? Well, for starters you can say that the team won another Ivy League championship, zooming through the league at a perfect 7-0, finishing up by sweeping Harvard and Dartmouth this weekend.
They don't have home runs in tennis, but Princeton's women have been on quite a run. The Tigers have now won seven of the last eight Ivy titles, including four straight. This year's championship came in Year 1 under head coach Jamea Jackson.
They don't have home runs in rowing either, but the Princeton women's open rowers had a grand slam of a weekend, ending the 22-race winning streak of No. 1 Texas while beating the Longhorns and No. 3 Yale. The Tigers crossed the line first in the first varsity 8 race in 6:24.2, followed eight-tenths of a second later by Texas and 4.2 seconds later by Yale.
Where else don't they have home runs?
In lacrosse, where the Princeton men took down Harvard 17-11 to set up a winner-take-all game for the Ivy League championship at Cornell this coming Saturday at noon. After that will be the Ivy tournament, where Princeton, Cornell and Penn will be joined by the winner of Saturday's Yale-Harvard game. Princeton will play either Yale or Harvard as the top seed or Penn as the third seed, depending on the outcome in Ithaca.
There were no home runs on Sherrerd Field Saturday. There was a big run by the home team, who broke the game open early with an 8-0 run after trailing 3-2 in the first quarter.
As for golf, there are also no home runs. There aren't perfect games either, but the Princeton men's golf team came about as close as you can Saturday in Round 2 of the Ivy League championships.
Princeton was nine shots behind Dartmouth after Round 1 Friday at the Stanwich Club in Greenwich. In fact, Princeton also trailed Harvard and Columbia as well and was actually closer to last place than first place.
Then Saturday happened.
Princeton destroyed the field Saturday, led by a course-record-tying 66 by Jackson Fretty, who is a Greenwich native by the way. By the time the day ended, Princeton had shot seven-under as a team and was eight strokes up on Dartmouth, which is quite a remarkable turnaround. By yesterday afternoon, Princeton had itself the Ivy League championship and an automatic bid to the NCAA Regionals.
The final numbers were Princeton 880 and second-place Columbia 18 shots back at 898. Fretty finished third as one of three Tigers in the top four, with William Huang in fourth place and Italian freshman Riccardo Fantinelli your winner with a five-under weekend that won by four shots.
For Princeton head coach Will Green, that's nine Ivy League championships, including two of the last three.
