As Brown baseball headed into the ninth inning of the Ivy League Tournament opener in New Haven, they faced a Herculean challenge. Down 4-3 to No. 2 Penn, No. 3 Brown would need to scrape together a run to tie the game. If they failed to meet the moment, the Bears would suffer a near-fatal first loss in the double-elimination tournament.
But Brown soared above the match’s pressures, scoring a sensational 4 runs to stun the Quakers and grab their first postseason victory since 2007. Over the course of the tournament, the Bears battled their way to the championship game, falling in a hard-fought match to No. 1 Yale.
“We came together and believed in the process and standard that our coaching staff preached,” outfielder Alex Benevento ’28 wrote in an email to The Herald. “We had an amazing senior class that led the way the whole year, and we wanted to win it for them.”
In the top of the ninth on Friday, Matt Luigs ’29 singled and Mika Petersen ’26 — the newly-minted 2026 Ivy League Player of the Year — worked a walk to begin to load the bases. When Benevento stepped up to the plate, he jumped on a hanging off-speed pitch, swatting it to the warning track in left field. Although Quaker outfielder Gavin Collins managed to corral the deep fly ball, Luigs used the sacrifice fly to dash all the way to home plate, scoring the tying run.
“Stepping up to the plate, my mindset was just to stay within myself and not try to do too much,” Benevento wrote in an email to The Herald. “When the ball left the bat, I didn’t know the result that was going to come of it, but I’m thankful that Matty has the instincts that he does.”
Soon after, infielder Mark Henshon ’26 sent a fly ball down the right field line, where it dropped onto the turf to clear the bases. “I just wanted to find a way to be able to come through and help the team,” Henshon wrote in an email to The Herald. The momentous double created a 7-4 advantage for Bruno, which they kept during the bottom of the inning to seal the victory.
The next day, the Bears faced the Bulldogs with a trip to the championship game on the line. Though most of the innings showcased an evenly-matched, low-scoring affair, the sixth inning spelled disaster for Bruno.
After trading 1 run apiece in the first inning –– infielder DJ Dillehay ’26 recorded a two-out RBI single for Luigs to run home –– the scoreboard went without a change for four straight innings. Over that stretch, starting pitcher Dylan Reid ’26 did not allow a single hit. But in the top of the sixth, Reid let up four hits, including a two-run homer over the left-field wall.
In an email to The Herald, Head Coach Frank Holbrook wrote that the Bears had “similar offensive opportunities” to the Bulldogs but were not able to “cash in like Yale did in (the sixth) inning.”
The Bears attempted to respond to Yale’s barrage, but remained scoreless until the ninth. Down to their final out, Petersen blasted a solo home run, but the run came too late to mount any meaningful comeback.
The contest’s outcome sent the Bulldogs to the championship game, while the Bears would need to conquer Columbia in a Sunday elimination game to stage a rematch against the tournament hosts.
Just a day later, Bruno came through under pressure, earning a 4-2 win over the Lions — it was Brown’s turn to ride a sixth inning of offensive firepower all the way to victory. After Dillehay reached first base on a center-field single, Logan Meusy ’26 hammered a ball to deep right field.
Columbia’s pitcher “threw me a first pitch cutter on the outer half of the plate,” Meusy wrote in an email to The Herald, which changed his hitting strategy. He began thinking more about “staying inside the ball and shooting something the other way.”
The Lions then intentionally walked Henshon, and Christian Butera ’28 stepped up to the plate. On a 0-1 pitch, Butera went straight back to right field for a two-run single. A sacrifice bunt by Brandon Chang ’27 scored Henshon and pushed the Bears’ advantage to 4-0.
Pitcher Drew Nelson ’29, with a gleaming outing of 8.0 shutout innings, carried Brown to victory; Benevento wrote that the pitcher was “throwing a gem.” In a last-ditch effort to keep their season alive, Columbia created two runs in the top of the ninth, but their comeback came up short.
Only four hours later, the Bears had an opportunity for revenge against Yale, but the well-rested Bulldogs dispatched Bruno once more to earn the Ivy League’s berth to the NCAA Division I Baseball Championship.
Out of the gate, the Bears demonstrated their eagerness to make up for their previous loss to the Bulldogs. Benevento brought Luigs home with a single in the top of the first. Bruno tallied 2 more runs in the second, including scoring hits from both Andrew Hanlon ’27 and Petersen.
But Yale once again demonstrated their offensive brilliance, tying up the contest with 3 runs and 4 hits in the bottom of the inning. They ran up the score in the third and fourth innings, adding 2 more runs in each to push their lead to 7-3.
Brown could not build any offensive pressure in the game’s middle innings. To their credit, though, Bruno refused to go quietly, cobbling together 2 runs in the top of the eighth inning. Benevento recorded another hit and eventually reached home when Henshon was hit by a pitch. Butera’s sacrifice fly brought Dillehay across the plate to bring Brown’s score within 2 runs of Yale’s, but the score remained unchanged until the game’s close.
“We competed well, start to finish,” Holbrook wrote of the weekend’s final contest. “We just didn’t execute in certain spots the way we needed to.”
“Although things may not have gone our way in the end, I was proud of the fight that our team put up,” Benevento added. The win against Columbia was Brown’s 23rd of the season — tied for Bruno’s fourth-highest tally in history.
“You never know what chances you’re going to get and when they’re going to happen, so you always have to be ready,” Benevento wrote. “I’m confident that next year our team is going to live by this standard and be able to accept the results that come, knowing that we left it all out there.”
