Spring Break Trip Begins at USF

Tuesday, March 14

Tampa, Fla. / USF Baseball Stadium

6:00 PM

Dartmouth College

USF

Photo by: Richard C. Lewis

3/14/2023 8:54:00 AM | Baseball

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Dartmouth looking for its first win of the young season

By: Rick Bender

DARTMOUTH (0-7) at USF (5-11)
March 14-15, 2023 • USF Baseball Stadium • Tampa, Fla.

Florida Getaway
Dartmouth is hoping that its second trip to the state of Florida will be more successful than the first one it took at the end of February when the Big Green lost all three games to nationally ranked Miami. With seven games against three quality opponents on the docket, Dartmouth certainly has its work cut out for it, beginning with a USF squad that has a deceptive record.

Last Games in Review
• Since the Big Green did not play last week while in the midst of winter exams (Dartmouth has quarters instead of semesters), let's go back to the first weekend of March when they lost each of their four games.
• The first contest at the USA Baseball Complex in North Carolina was a slugfest with Wagner with the Seahawks overcoming an early 7-2 deficit to beat Dartmouth, 19-13.
• The Green scored in all but two innings in the game and swatted six doubles as Max Zajec set a career high with five RBIs, but an eight-run third for Wagner did them in.
• Dartmouth was on the wrong end of a 17-4 score against Holy Cross, though freshman Ivan Hoyt did drive in two runs.
• Junior right-hander Clark Gilmore pitched admirably against Penn State in his first career start, yielding two runs over 4.1 innings with five strikeouts. But the Nittany Lions scored six runs in the sixth and seventh stanzas to defeat the Big Green, 8-2.
• The heartbreaker of the weekend came in the finale, a 4-3 defeat at the hands of Wagner again. Connor Bertsch delivered an early two-run single and Kolton Freeman walked with the bases loaded to tie the game in the eighth. But the Seahawks walked it off in the ninth on an infield hit, two hit batters and a single, all coming with two down.
• If there is a silver lining to the 0-7 start, it is that the last time Dartmouth lost seven straight to begin a season, it roared back to finish 27-18, win an Ivy League title and advance to the NCAA Regional (2009).
• Bertsch extended his streak of reaching base safely to 13 games dating back to last season.

Overall Record vs. USF
• These two teams have played eight games on the diamond with the Bulls winning seven.
• The most recent games were played in 2019 with USF winning all three by a combined 27-5 margin.
• The one Big Green victory came on March 26, 2016, by a 1-0 decision as Duncan Robinson twirled a four-hit shutout and Joe Purritano drove in Ben Socher in the sixth for the game's only run.
• Against American Athletic Conference teams, Dartmouth has an all-time record of 7-25 and has played East Carolina more than any other current member, going 2-9 against the Pirates.
• The AAC team the Green have had the most success against is UCF at 3-3, and the two teams play three games this weekend.

Scouting the Bulls
• Why did I say earlier that USF's record is deceptive? Probably because the Bulls have played one of the 20 most difficult schedules in the country to date, going 2-4 against ranked teams with another three losses to the team ranked fourth in the RPI (Northeastern)
• USF just returned to Tampa after dropping two of three at Long Beach State.
• As a team, the Bulls are hitting .246 with 15 homers in their 16 games while averaging 4.7 runs per game.
• Bobby Boser and John Montes lead the offense with a .340 average while Boser tops the team with an OPS of 1.006.
• Boser, Daniel Cantu and Jackson Mayo each have a team-high three homers.
• The pitchers have put up an ERA of 6.63 as a staff with the best work coming from the bullpen, specifically Riley Skeen (2.45 ERA in 11.0 IP) and Ethan Brown (21 strikeouts in 16.2 IP).
• Overall the defense has been solid with one error per game for a .975 fielding percentage (nearly one-third of the Bulls' errors have been committed by pitchers).
• Billy Mohl (Tulane '07) is in his sixth season as the USF head coach, sporting an overall record of 132-130-1. Twice he has guided the team to an NCAA Regional, and four of his players were selected in the MLB Draft in 2022.

Probable Big Green Starting Pitchers
• Fifth-year senior LHP Trystan Sarcone (0-2, 18.90), off to a rough start this spring, will throw the first inning of the opener against the Bulls before settling into his weekend slot at UCF on Friday. USF will counter with a left-hander of its own in LHP Nolan Hudi (1-1, 4.70) , who had mixed results in his first three starts before handcuffing Pitt for six stanzas last week, striking out 10 in six innings of one-run ball.
• On Wednesday, senior RHP Jack Metzger (0-2, 13.06) will get the same treatment as Sarcone to prepare him for the weekend. He has pitched at least five innings in each of his first two starts, striking out six batters in both outings. The Bulls will send rookie RHP Lawson Gailey (0-1, 6.23) to the bump. In his last outing on March 3, he gave up six runs — but only one earned — in 1.2 innings against Northeastern.

What's Up Next
These two games with USF kick off the spring break trip to Florida. Dartmouth will travel to Orlando to square off with UCF for three games over the weekend before taking on the Jacksonville Dolphins next Tuesday and Wednesday. That action will lead the Big Green into conference play at Princeton on March 25-26.

Tough Start
For the first time since 2009, Dartmouth has started a season with seven consecutive losses. But if you take a closer look at that year, after the Big Green actually dropped their first eight contests, they rebounded to finish the year with a 27-18 record, an Ivy League title and a berth in an NCAA Regional. And they did not lose consecutive games after that eight-game skid until the last two games of the season.

Starter Relief
In each of the first five games, Dartmouth starting pitchers allowed at least as many runs as innings they threw. But junior Clark Gilmore halted that trend in his first career start, holding Penn State to two runs over 4.1 frames. The next day, freshman Eddie Albert tossed five full innings and yielded three runs while fanning six against Wagner. Neither were quality starts by definition, but this is hopefully a new trend.

Walk-Off Woes
Before Wagner produced a two-out, RBI single in the bottom of the ninth to defeat Dartmouth on March 5, 4-3, the Big Green had not suffered a walk-off defeat in nearly five full years. The last team to walk it off against Dartmouth was Penn on April 1, 2018, in the 11th inning of the first game of a doubleheader, 8-7. Is it "foolish" to think the Big Green can return the favor on April Fool's Day this year when the two teams meet in Hanover?

Power Outage
Dartmouth has hit just one home run over the first seven games, but it is not an uncommon occurrence. Five times in the previous 15 seasons, the Big Green have had just one round-tripper at this point in the season — 2007, '12, '14, '15 and '19. In three of those years, Dartmouth went on to win a divisional title, so it's much too early to read into the lack of power; the 2019 squad ended up with 29 long balls.

Climbing New Hoyts
Freshman Ivan Hoyt, a two-sport athlete who is also a wide receiver on the football team, got his first action on the diamond in North Carolina, going 4-for-15 (.267) with three doubles and four RBIs to provide a boost to the offense. But his production didn't stop at the plate; the rookie also tossed a perfect inning on the mound versus Wagner and will likely get more opportunities to perform as a two-way player.