As most coaches will tell you, the only way to get better is to play better teams. The baseball team did that on Wednesday when it traveled to cross-town Div. II Bentley in Waltham, Mass., but the Jumbos fell 12-11 to the Falcons.
After evoking images of a championship team with a sweep of defending Div. III World Series victor Trinity over the weekend, coach John Casey's squad was firing on all cylinders as it entered the mid-week competition. The team, however, squandered its opportunities and halted its four-game winning streak to drop to 16-12 on the season.
Bentley took an early lead, posting a five-spot on the board in the first inning off of Jumbo starter and junior tri-captain Ben Simon. That was only the beginning in a game that saw a combined 23 runs cross the plate and 28 hits pounded off of both teams' pitching staffs.
"I don't think we got started on the right foot," said senior centerfielder Jim O'Leary, who contributed three hits and two RBI in the loss. "We didn't come in with the same intensity as we did against Trinity. The thing about college baseball is that every out matters; when you give teams extra outs, they take advantage."
Although both teams committed two errors apiece, Tufts' miscues were more costly, as only six of the 11 runs that Simon yielded were earned. The Jumbo errors, committed by senior shortstop and tri-captain Greg Chertok and freshman third baseman Kevin Casey, occurred in the bottom of the third inning, which helped Bentley to post another five-spot on the board and take an early 10-3 lead.
Inopportune errors have been a contributing factor in a number of Tufts' 12 losses; the Jumbos have not necessarily played sloppy defense, but their mistakes have been costly and opponents have capitalized. In the four-game series against Middlebury on Apr. 14-15, the team surrendered nine unearned runs, and in the weekend series prior to that on Apr. 8-9 against Bowdoin, nearly one-third of the runs scored against Tufts crossed the plate because of miscues in the field.
Tufts refused to go quietly, however, and fought back to bring the deficit to two with a three-run rally in the top of the third.
Chertok jump-started the offense with the first Tufts hit of the ballgame, pushing a leadoff bunt down the first-base line in the third and beating the tag of Bentley first baseman junior Tom Haugh.
"[Chertok] did a good job of starting to make something happen," O'Leary said. "He showed good leadership bunting on his own. He usually bunts to the third-base side, and bunting to the first-base side in this situation was key."
The Jumbos amassed four hits in that inning before it ended prematurely when freshman Kevin Casey lined the ball to right for an easy out that left the bases loaded.
"Any time you get the first runner on in an inning is huge," junior Nick Curato said. "You have to take each at-bat the same way no matter what; [the score should make] no difference. When you get down, you have to fight back."
Tufts continued to tee-off on Bentley pitching and took its first lead of the ballgame, fighting back from the early 5-0 and 10-3 deficits to grab an 11-10 lead in the sixth inning off of freshman reliever Terence Wells.
Jumbo freshman Brian McDonough singled up the middle to start the last rally of the game for his team. After Curato singled for his third hit of the afternoon, junior Chris Decembrele walked and Kevin Casey recorded a sacrifice fly. Chertok again positioned himself at the center of a rally, smacking a double to centerfield on a 1-0 pitch and bringing in two runs on the play. Junior second baseman Brian Casey followed suit, singling for the last Tufts RBI of the game.
As was the case throughout this back-and-forth offensive matchup, Bentley countered with two runs of its own in the bottom half of the sixth. With that lead, the home team brought in freshman reliever Scott Kickery, who mystified the previously explosive Jumbo bats for the last three innings. After pounding out 13 hits against the first two Bentley hurlers, Tufts could scratch out only a walk against Kickery.
With its last NESCAC series quickly approaching, Tufts will focus on taking the field this weekend against Colby with the same confidence and focus that it had against Trinity. A successful series could potentially yield home-field advantage in the NESCAC Tournament.
"We need to dominate this weekend," O'Leary said. "We need to be the same team that beat Trinity. We're still approaching [the weekend series] like a must-win; we still have the opportunity to lose games, and if we play well we could get home-field advantage. We need to try to get back on the right track."
