CU looks to rebound from rough series with strong showing at Fordham

The Lions’ hopes of heading back to the Ivy League Championship Series may be over, but their season still has another week remaining. Columbia (17-21, 7-9 Ivy) heads to the Bronx today, where it will face off in a doubleheader against Fordham (24-15) in its final non-conference games of the season.

The Lions have lost six of their last seven games, including the three straight losses at Princeton that officially knocked Columbia out of contention for the Gehrig Division title.

“We thought that we’d be in a position heading into the last weekend that we’d be playing for the divisional championship,” head coach Brett Boretti said. “We had confidence and we thought we had a good chance at making a run at things.” 

One of the biggest problems the Lions faced this year was coming out on the wrong end of close games. Things were no different this weekend, when after a thrilling victory in the series’ first game the Light Blue lost the final three contests by a combined five runs.

“Offensively—we had a quite a few one-run losses,” Boretti said. “In the end, maybe we were putting a little too much pressure on ourselves offensively and tried to do too much, and we ended up not being able to do enough. We knew the league was going to be tougher. Some things didn’t go our way, there were some tight ball games, and that happens.”

The one facet of Columbia’s game that has been consistent all year has been the starting pitching and with half the rotation—seniors Geoff Whitaker and Dan Bracey—set to step on the field for their final week as Lions, the team will hope other pitchers will begin to step up. Today’s doubleheader is the perfect time for the Lions to test out their younger arms, since Boretti has used the midweek games to send pitchers who are not in the weekend rotation to the mound.

Fordham comes in to today’s doubleheader off of two losses at Charlotte. Prior to this setback, however, the Rams had won seven games in a row. Fordham, tied for fifth out of 13 teams in the Atlantic 10 Conference, is led by its pitching, which sports the third-best ERA, 3.73, in its league. The Rams’ offense, built more around speed than power, is led by senior catcher Chris Walker, who is batting .316 with 29 RBIs.

Last year, the Lions rallied in both games of its doubleheader at Robertson Field to sweep Fordham with 6-3 and 5-4 victories. Unfortunately for Columbia, unlike last year, it has to maintain its focus despite knowing this is the last week of the spring in which it will be in action.

“Our season’s not over—we’ve got six games left, and we’re very much going to compete,” Boretti said. “We might be out of the race for the division before we wanted to be, but we’ve got a lot of things left on the table this year to finish off. Fordham is a local rivalry—we’d very much like to go there and win two games from them.”

The doubleheader, consisting of two seven-inning games, will commence at 4 p.m. at Fordham’s Houlihan Park