The baseball team was on the field in Hanover, N.H., late Wednesday afternoon, shaking hands with the Dartmouth squad it just swept when the news started floating around - Harvard, which had started the day tied with Brown for the Red Rolfe Division lead, had split its own doubleheader against Yale. With just four games left in the season, the Bears were now alone in first place.
But tri-captain catcher Devin Thomas '07 said there were no cheers, slaps on the back or celebrations of any kind. After all, the Bears' one-game lead - thin enough already - will be on the line this weekend against a hard-hitting Yale squad that needs to sweep the four-game series for any shot of making the playoffs. And Harvard will have a four-game series of its own against an anemic Dartmouth team that lost all four of its games against Brown this year by a combined score of 49-15.
Still, there was some satisfaction with the situation.
"Obviously - I'm not going to lie - I'm glad (Harvard) had at least split," Head Coach Marek Drabinski said by phone from the team's bus last night, as the Bears traveled back from New Hampshire. "More importantly, I'm really proud of our guys for doing what we had to do. We've been talking about that all along, controlling our own destiny."
Brown did that yesterday thanks to the usual strong work of its top two starting pitchers, Jeff Dietz '08 and James Cramphin '07. Though coming off just three days' rest and backed by a shaky defense, the duo combined to allow just four earned runs in the 7-3 and 12-7 victories. The Bears, now 11-5 in the Ivy League (16-17 overall), pounded out 27 hits over 18 innings against the Big Green who dropped to 3-13 in Ivy play.
Brown got an early lead in the top of the first after Matt Nuzzo's '09 RBI single. But the Big Green scored two runs in the bottom of the frame with the help of three errors.
In the second inning, Brown took a commanding 5-2 lead, with Thomas two-run double being the big blow. Tri-captain Bryan Tews '07 and Robert Papenhause '09 both added RBI singles in the fifth to give Brown more breathing room. The Big Green, with only five hits in the game, put up a small rally in the seventh but could muster only a single run on an RBI groundout.
The Bears got off to another quick start in game two, scoring single runs in the first and third innings before exploding for four in the fifth, when Thomas hit his second two-run double of the day. Dartmouth finally got on the board in the bottom of the fifth and then, in the sixth, threw up six runs to take a 7-6 lead. In that inning, "the defense just fell apart," Drabinski said, and the Big Green sent 11 batters to the plate.
But the Bears responded in a big way in top of the seventh, when Thomas hit his eighth home run of the year to lead off the inning. The Bears then scored four more runs, stringing together another four hits to go with an error and a walk. Tri-captain pitcher Ethan Silverstein '07 entered the game and threw two scoreless innings before closer Rob Hallberg '08 finished in the ninth.
"Silverstein coming in and shutting them down and calming us down - that was key," Dietz said.
Overall, Drabinski said he was happy with how the Bears looked as they head into the season's final series.
"I thought we swung the bats exceptionally well today," he said, and he "had no problem" with the pitching. But he was a little concerned about his defense. After committing six errors in Sunday's doubleheader against Harvard, they committed seven total yesterday.
"We didn't play great at all defensively, and we made a lot of routine plays a lot harder than they should have been," he said.
This weekend, the Bears - trying to make the championship for the first time since the league went to a two-division format in 1993 - will face a Yale team that has been inconsistent all season. It was clearly evident yesterday: After Harvard ace Shawn Haviland threw a complete-game one-hitter against the Bulldogs in the first game, the Bulldogs exploded for eight runs in the first inning of game two and ended up with a 13-0 victory.
"We're definitely going to respect them," Drabinski said. "They've got Marc Sawyer and Ryan Lavarnway, two of the best hitters in the league." As of Monday, Sawyer and Lavarnway were batting .391 and .459, respectively, in 37 games this season, with 14 homers between them.
Drabinski and his players said they were going to try to ignore what Harvard does this weekend, which might be for the best. Thomas expects the Crimson to "take care of business" against the Big Green, and in terms of the pitching rotation, Harvard might be in a better position than Brown. Except for Haviland, Harvard will have its rotation pitching on regular rest, while the Bears will try to have Dietz and Cramphin throw on Sunday, their second straight starts on short rest. Dietz and Cramphin threw 7 and 7 1/3, respectively, innings last Saturday, and both threw six innings today.
Fortunately for the Bears, Dietz didn't seem overly concerned about the situation.
"Whatever I've got to do," the right-hander said. "We just got to win."
Brown is at Yale on Saturday, and then hosts the Bulldogs at Murray Stadium at 1 p.m. on Sunday.
