Regular Season Comes to a Close Against Columbia in Hanover

Saturday, May 14

Hanover, N.H.

11:30 AM

Dartmouth College

Columbia

The Class of 2022, clockwise from top left: Kunaal Verma, Justin Murray, Bryce Daniel, Kade Kretzschmar, Cole Roland, Trystan Sarcone, Nathan Skinner

Photo by: Gil Talbot

Regular Season Comes to a Close Against Columbia in Hanover

5/13/2022 9:40:00 AM | Baseball

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The baseball team needs a sweep of the Lions to keep its postseason hopes alive

By: Rick Bender

DARTMOUTH (22-18, 12-6) vs. COLUMBIA (26-13, 16-2)
May 14 (11:30 a.m. doubleheader)
May 15 (Noon)
Red Rolfe Field at Biondi Park
Hanover, N.H.

Final Games of the Regular Season
Dartmouth is still alive for a spot in the Ivy Championship Series, and it is quite simple as to what has to happen for them to qualify: win all three games against league-leading Columbia and Penn lose all three games at last-place Princeton. But no matter what happens this weekend, the Big Green can finish no worse than third place in the final standings.

There is even more incentive for Dartmouth to take at least one game from the Lions. Columbia enters the weekend having won 19 straight games. Should the Lions win all three, they would break the Ivy League record of 21 consecutive victories set by the 1970 Big Green team that played in the College World Series.

Senior Day
Between games of the doubleheader on Saturday, Dartmouth will honor the seven baseball players in the senior class: Bryce Daniel, Kade Kretzschmar, Justin Murray, Cole Roland, Trystan Sarcone, Nathan Skinner and Kunaal Verma. All seven have played a part in helping the Big Green post their second winning season over the last seven complete campaigns.

A Look Back at the Past Week
• Dartmouth dropped a series for the first time in just over a month, losing two of three to Manhattan.
• Kolton Freeman played the hero in the series finale, belting a solo homer in the eighth to tie the game at two before crushing another bomb in the 10th for a walk-off, 3-2 victory.
• That was just the second extra-inning game of the season for the Big Green and second consecutive one having lost, 3-2, in 11 innings the day before.
• The Jaspers won the first game by a final of 10-6 despite terrific production from the bottom four hitters in the Dartmouth lineup as they went a combined 9-for-15 with all six runs.
• Jack Metzger earned his first collegiate victory with 3.2 shutout innings of relief in the finale.
• In that win, Dartmouth pitchers did not strike out a single batter for the first time in eight years. The staff is just five strikeouts away from becoming the first in Big Green history to fan 300 in a season.
• Tyler Cox extended his streak of reaching base to 28 consecutive games, the longest known streak at Dartmouth since at least 2006.

Overall Record vs. Columbia
• Dartmouth owns a sizable advantage in the all-time series, 112-80, and has won seven of the last 10 contests.
• These two teams squared off in the Ivy Championship Series five times in an eight-year span, splitting the first two showdowns with Columbia winning in 2008 and the Big Green in 2010. But the Lions took the title in three consecutive years (2013-15), all of which were played in New York.
• Dartmouth head coach Bob Whalen has a 48-30 mark in games against Columbia and is 25-18 head-to-head against Lions coach Brett Boretti.
• The Big Green have never lost a regular-season series to the Lions at Biondi Park since it debuted in 2009, splitting each of the first three doubleheaders before sweeping Columbia in 2016 and taking two of three in 2018 for a 7-4 mark at the venue.
• Dartmouth is 28-19 against the Lions on the site since the field was named in honor of Red Rolfe before the 1970 campaign, and 45-29 in Hanover since 1923.

Scouting the Lions
• There isn't a hotter team in the country as Columbia has won 19 straight games with its last loss a month and a half ago to St. John's on March 30.
• As a team, the Lions have an OPS of nearly .900 on the season and lead the Ivy League in batting (.302), slugging (.510), runs (8.3 per game), doubles (93), home runs (56) and stolen bases (71).
• Five regulars are hitting between .316 and .346, led by Andy Blake, who is third on the team with nine home runs.
• Hayden Schott has essentially matched Blake's numbers with 11 long balls while Joshua Solomon has launched 10 as that trio accounts for more than half of the team's homers.
• Tyler McGregor (15-of-16) and Solomon (12-of-14) are the top threats on the base paths, but just about anyone will run.
• The pitching staff is second in the league with a 5.04 ERA but is not an overpowering group as they rank sixth in the league in strikeouts per nine innings.
• The defense is solid with a .969 fielding percentage, and it denies the running game better than any team in the league having allowed just 19 stolen bases, by far the fewest.

Last Time Against Columbia
These two teams played a pretty wild series in New York three years ago, splitting a pair of blowouts before the Lions added another to take the finale and claim the regular-season series for the first time since 2003 (Dartmouth won seven and split the other eight).

The Big Green held a 2-1 lead into the fourth of game one when everything fell apart and the Lions exploded for 22 runs over the next four innings to defeat Dartmouth, 23-9. The two teams combined for 39 hits, but the day was about to get even longer.

In the second game of the doubleheader, the Big Green returned the favor by scoring 23 runs of their own while holding Columbia to just one run as Dartmouth posted its second largest margin of victory in a league game and third largest since 1900. Nate Ostmo homered and drove in six while Matt Feinstein hit a four-bagger and drove in five. Jordan Bustabad, who had eight career at-bats, smacked a three-run bomb for good measure in support of Justin Murray, who tossed six innings of one-run ball before Alec Vaules was perfect over the final three frames to earn a save.

The Lions slowly pulled away in the final game, scoring a run in the first and second stanzas before adding three in the third en route to an 11-1 triumph. The lone Big Green run crossed the plate in the ninth to avoid the shutout as Feinstein walked with the bases loaded.

Probable Starting Pitchers
• Dartmouth isn't going to change now, sending the same three pitchers to the mound in the same order as it has since Ivy play began. Senior RHP Nathan Skinner (5-4, 5.92) looks to finish his Big Green career on a high note after getting roughed up for six runs in four innings last week against Manhattan. Columbia will counter with RHP Joe Sheets (2-1, 5.23) who has a 3.71 ERA in his last five starts with 27 strikeouts and just six walks in 26.2 innings.
• Senior LHP Trystan Sarcone (5-3, 4.81), who leads the league in strikeout-to-walk ratio (4.0), did not get a decision in his last outing despite yielding just two runs over 6.2 innings. For the Lions, RHP Andy Leon (3-0, 2.79) gets the nod, a rookie with just four starts and 19.1 innings under his belt but has not allowed a run over his last four appearances spanning 11.0 innings.
• Toeing the slab in the regular-season finale will be RHP Justin Murray (4-3, 7.57), who has posted back-to-back quality starts of two runs and at least six innings. Dartmouth is also 6-1 in his last seven starts with the offense averaging over 11 runs in those games. Columbia has penciled in RHP Sean Higgins (3-3, 7.40) to go up against him. He has thrown more than five innings just once, that coming back on April 9 against Brown, striking out eight in 6.1 innings but allowing seven earned runs.

Three Named Academic All-District
For the first time in program history, Dartmouth had three players selected for the CoSIDA Academic All-District I Team: junior Kolton Freeman, and seniors Justin Murray and Nathan Skinner. A total of 15 players from the Northeast earned the honor, seven coming from the Ivy League (three from Harvard, one from Yale). The players will now go onto the ballot for Academic All-America with the first-, second- and third-teams being announced in June. The only Big Green player to be named an Academic All-American was Jeff Keller '14, twice chosen for the first team.

Joltin' Kolton
Kolton Freeman single-handedly put Dartmouth over the top in the series finale against Manhattan to help the Green salvage a game with the Jaspers. Making his first start in right field this year, the junior crushed the first pitch in the bottom of the eighth onto Park Street for a solo homer, tying the game at two. Two innings later, he led off the 10th and did it again, this time on a 3-1 pitch, providing the first walk-off homer (and walk-off win of any kind) in just over four years. And the last Dartmouth player to hit two homers in a game with the second being a walk-off was Mike Levy '01 on April 28, 2001, to defeat Harvard, 6-5, in the 10th inning. And with his two-homer game against Gardner-Webb back on March 6, he is just the 10th Big Green player with two or more multi-homer games in a career and fifth with two in one season (Jim Lavery, 1984; Aaron Meyer, 1999; Brian Nickerson, 2001; Joe Purritano, 2013).

Extra! Extra!
Through 38 games this year, Dartmouth had not played a single extra-inning game. That changed against Manhattan as the final two games of the series both needed more than nine innings to decide. The Jaspers won the first one, 3-2, on a solo homer in the 11th, and the Big Green returned the favor with a 3-2 walk-off win the next day on a solo homer in the 10th. Dartmouth is now 44-41-2 in extra innings with head coach Bob Whalen at the helm.

Weather Jinx Alert
I'll regret writing this I'm sure, but there has not been a single game canceled or even postponed due to weather this season (the game on May 4 was canceled due to a scheduling conflict for Merrimack). I'm not looking it up, but I will proclaim that this is the first year that has ever happened in Dartmouth history. I dare anyone to prove me wrong. And yes, there is a 70 percent chance of thunderstorms on Sunday as I write this. I am tempting fate indeed.

Jack-ed Up
Junior reliever Jack Metzger has been nearly untouchable for the last two months, posting a 1.30 ERA over 27.2 innings with six saves, including one save in every Ivy League series except one. He has only given up one earned run in his last 14.2 innings over the last month, and he earned his first collegiate victory in the last game against Manhattan, twirling 3.2 scoreless stanzas before Kolton Freeman hit his walk-off homer in the 10th.

Cox Still Streaking
While sophomore Tyler Cox did not have a multi-hit game in any of the three contests against Manhattan, just the second time all season he has gone that long without one, he did managed to bang out one knock in each game. That not only extended his hitting streak to 10 games, but also his streak of reaching base to 28. No other Big Green player has had a longer such streak since at least 2005. He also is almost assuredly going to win the Blair Bat Award for the highest batting average in Ivy League play; he enters the final weekend with a .482 average, 79 points ahead of Penn's Ben Miller in second (and 83 points ahead of teammate Kade Kretzschmar, making them two of the three players in the league batting .400 against Ivy pitchers).

Return of Pitcher's Best Friend
A double play is generally referred to as a pitcher's best friend. Well, the Big Green had a lot of pitchers without that friend to lean on during the month of April as the Dartmouth defense did not turn even one in the first 16 games of the month. But on the final day of the month, the Big Green turned two twin-killings in the opener at Harvard. That opened the flood gates, apparently, as Dartmouth has turned two in each of the four games this month.

Welcome Back Fagler
Sounds like a sitcom, I know, but former Dartmouth pitcher Tyler Fagler '20 returned to Biondi Park the first weekend of May as a member of the Manhattan Jaspers. Injuries and then the pandemic kept him from reaching his full potential with the Green, throwing just 37.1 innings while going 1-3 with a 5.06 ERA in his Dartmouth career. But he sure seemed comfortable back on the bump in Hanover as the right-hander tossed five scoreless innings against his former mates and picked up the win in the 3-2, 11-inning Jasper win in game two. That was nearly as many innings as he threw in his entire Big Green career (6.2), but both of his collegiate victories have come on that mound.

Records in Jeopardy
Justin Murray and Tyler Cox are both threatening to break a program single-season record this year. With 19 doubles, Murray is just two shy of the mark set by Jeff Keller '14 (21) in 2013. As for Cox, he enters the weekend with 69 hits, six shy of the single-season mark established by Mike Conway '99 (75) in 1998. The sophomore is eighth nationally in hits per game (1.73) and 15th in average (.406).

The pitching staff is also on the verge of setting a new team record for strikeouts. The record of 297 was set in 2016, and this year's group has 294. Yet Dartmouth failed to record even a single whiff in the 3-2, 10-inning victory over Manhattan. It was the first time that had happened in since a 2-1 victory at Boston College on April 8, 2014.

Triple Your Fun
Dartmouth has hit 22 triples as a team this year, the fifth most in Division I entering the weekend, while its per-game rate of 0.55 tops the nation. Kade Kretzschmar has five of those three-baggers, 11th nationally, while both Nathan Cmeyla and Tyler Robinson have four apiece. Only one team in program history has hit more triples in a season, the 2011 squad that had 27.