With their chance at a playoff run slipping away, the baseball team (8-24, 3-12 Ivy) got swept at home over the weekend by the first-place Columbia Lions (19-14, 12-3 Ivy) by finals of 15-4, 19-7 and 6-1. The Bears, stuck in an eight-game losing streak, currently sit at the bottom of the Ivy League standings with six conference games remaining.
“We’re not playing at the standard of baseball that we expect and that we want to play at,” first baseman Mark Henshon ’26 said following the series. “We’re just trying to get back to playing the baseball that we can play and that we know how to play.”
“We put in a lot of work to get more than the results we’re getting,” right fielder Nathan Brasher ’25 said.
Columbia was led all weekend by their fearsome offense, which ranks first in on-base percentage and slugging percentage this season, including an eye-popping 63 homers — more than Brown, Yale and Dartmouth combined. The Lions scored 40 runs on 45 hits across the three games, tallying seven home runs in the process.
“You look across the lineup, and their players have gained twenty pounds from the time they set foot on campus and since their sophomore year,” Head Coach Grant Achilles said. “They do a tremendous job of physical development.”
“It feels like they’re just catching barrels every inning and keeping us behind,” Henshon said. “We just had to keep trying to fight back all weekend.”
Columbia ambushed Brown starting pitchers Jack Seppings ’25 and Paxton Meyers ’24 early in the series’ first two games on Saturday and Sunday, scoring 10 and eight in the first three innings respectively. Three of the runs charged to Meyers were unearned after a two-out error by shortstop DJ Dillehay ’26.
“Our team had some opportunities to get off the field with two outs, and we just didn’t capitalize on that at times,” Achilles said. “If you give a team that’s really offensive extra outs, then they’re gonna make you pay.”
In the doubleheader and series finale on Sunday, pitcher Santhosh Gottam ’25 appeared to have finally found a cure for Columbia’s bats, allowing just one run in the first four innings on a leadoff homer to two-time reigning First Team All-Ivy player Cole Hage. But then the Lions erupted in the fifth, putting up a five-spot powered by five extra-base hits.
The Bears were only able to muster one run on an opposite-field single by last season’s Ivy batting champ Mika Petersen ’26 in the eighth.
“We had a number of chances to push some runs across and it just didn’t happen,” Achilles said. “We knew going into this weekend we were gonna have to score to win and it was no different.”
The weekend saw Brasher extend his impressive hitting streak to 17 games, as well as Henshon extending his on-base streak to 24 games before it was snapped in the series finale. Both players emphasized the team-focused approach which has led to their consistency this season.
“When you have a job in the forefront of your mind of ‘get on and help the team win,’ it’s a lot better than thinking about any stats or streak or anything like that,” Brasher said.
The Bears now look to its penultimate series of Ivy play against Yale in New Haven this coming weekend, where they’ll try to make a miraculous late-season push for the playoffs and reverse the momentum currently piling up against their favor.
“It’s contagious both ways,” Achilles said on trying to swing the team’s momentum. “Sometimes it just takes one solid inning or a bunch of hitters getting some cheap hits. At the same time, it’s really just continuing to go about your work, having an aggressive mindset with everything and trying to push for what we want in the result — not wait for it to happen.”
Linus is a sports editor from New York City. He is a junior concentrating in English, and when he's out of The Herald office you can find him rooting for the Mets, watching Star Wars or listening to The Beach Boys.
