JULIA TIERNAN/YH With two doubleheaders coming up this weekend, Yale needs quality innings from its pitchers.

Despite 'poorest effort,' baseball still optimistic

In baseball, it's never your fault. Key players are injured, or the other team has had more time to practice, or you didn't have the home-field advantage, or the wind was blowing the wrong way. But on Wed., Mar. 22, in its home opener, the Yale baseball team (5-12, 0-0 Ivy) lost 7-5 to the Quinnipiac Braves (3-4). Suddenly, the Bulldogs had no one to blame but themselves.

Coach John Stuper was furious after the loss. "That was possibly the poorest effort I have seen in my tenure as coach," he sputtered. "They played horribly. I tried to get them ready to play, and they weren't ready. They had no fire. That will be corrected in practice."

Stuper, who team members describe as a "players' coach," usually refers to his team in the first-person plural, not the third person. He's usually encouraging and optimistic. So when he says it's time to get tough, he means it.

"I don't think [Quinnipiac was] as good a team as us, but in baseball, that doesn't matter," first baseman Mike Kahney, JE '00, said. "It's which team you bring to the field that day. We just didn't concentrate." Quinnipiac broke the game open in the second inning, when errors by third baseman Steven Duke, TD '03, and shortstop Tony Coyne, BK '00, led to four unearned runs. "We really lost the game in the second inning," pitcher Jon Steitz, CC '02, who was on the mound at the time, said.

Steitz was the first of six Bulldog pitchers to try their arms against the Braves. In this weekend's two doubleheaders, Yale won't have the luxury of using so many hurlers in a single game. The pitching staff has been struggling with control all season long, yielding an average of five walks per game. "I haven't had the control on my fastball that I usually have," Steitz said. With just one-third of the season gone, Steitz has almost as many walks (19) as he had all last year (20). "It's annoying," Steitz said. "I had to pitch myself out of a jam [against Quinnipiac], and I couldn't do it."

The Bulldogs will need tighter defense to avoid more such jams. Duke is hitting well—.314, fourth-best on the team—but his fielding percentage is just .744. He made three errors in Wednesday's game and leads the team with 11. Kahney is having the opposite problem. His fielding is nearly flawless, but he's only 2-for-34 at the plate. A .297 hitter last year, his average now stands at .059. "It's important not to take an offensive load over onto defense," he said. Against Quin-nipiac, he went 0-for-2 before leaving the game in the seventh, frustrated and perplexed.

Baseball

Record: 5-12, 0-0 Ivy Coming Up: Sat., Mar. 25 vs. UMass (doubleheader), Noon; Sun., Mar. 26 vs. Sacred Heart (doubleheader), Noon.

Eli Second baseman Bo Ivy, SY '01, was the bright spot for the Bulldogs. Ivy went 3-for-4 with two home runs and a triple. When Ivy came up to bat with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, Quinnipiac coach Joe Mattei pulled starting pitcher Chris Pinto '00 after just over eight innings of work. "I wasn't going to let him face [Ivy] again," Mattei said. "That guy obviously had his number." Ivy struck out looking to end the game.

Nevertheless, Ivy seems to have everyone's number lately. Since returning to Yale this year after having transfered from Yale to the University of Texas, he's hitting .328, third-best on the team, and leading the team in slugging percentage, runs scored, hits, RBI, doubles, triples, home runs, total bases, and steals. What's his secret? "I try to stay consistent," he said. The team could take a tip from Ivy's consistency. "We're a good all-around team, we just need to pull together," Ivy said.

Stuper seems to agree that the Bulldogs have the right components to succeed—they just need to get those components working properly. He has left the lineup basically intact since the team left on its annual spring road trip. Their 5-11 record on the trip may sound dismal, but the team hasn't won as many as five games on that trip since 1996. This time around, thanks to excellent pitching performances by Sudha Reddy, BK '00, the Elis won both their games against Middle Tennessee State, a team that won 38 games last year. Reddy is 3-1 so far this season with a 3.91 ERA, second-best on the team.

Before losing to Quin-nipiac, Stuper could confidently speculate, "We're starting to come around. We had 20 hits in the last two games even though we lost," or "We had defensive lapses, but that will happen early in the season." A 5-11 road trip isn't so bad, considering that without even practicing outdoors beforehand, the Elis spent spring break tackling teams that have already played 20 or more games. Those factors are explanations, but they can also be excuses. After the Quinnipiac game, it is time to stop explaining mistakes and start facing them. "We didn't do anything correctly from any standpoint—hitting, pitching, or fielding," Kahney said. "We have to try to get ourselves back on track."

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