Lee Lowenfish

"Creating a winning culture" is one of the most popular phrases these days in the world of sports - so easy to say and so hard to achieve. This past Sunday May 18, Columbia won its 6th Ivy League baseball title in the last 10 seasons with a convincing 14-6 victory over surprise finalist Harvard at Yale's George W. Bush Field.

 

I took MetroNorth to New Haven and then a cab to see my Lions roar undefeated through the double elimination tourney.  Wiping away the memories of being winless at home in the first two Ivy post-season tournaments in this format, the Lions won two extra-inning nail-biters - over defending champion Penn and surprise entrant Harvard - and then beat Harvard a second time, leaving no doubt after they built an early 10-0 lead. 

 

Senior southpaw co-captain Jagger Edwards, a reliever last season, pitched into the sixth inning and sophomore Will Harrigan got the 3 2/3 inning save, his fifth of the season.  The Cantabs had eliminated host team Yale earlier on Sunday with a come-from-behind 8-6 victory.  The Lions blasted 7 homers, including two each by senior right fielder Anton Lazits, the MVP of the tourney, and sophomore catcher Owen Estabrook.  

 

Columbia coach Brett Boretti always schedules the toughest pre-Ivy League competition and it pays off in the crunch time of the season. I am not sure how much was learned by a March 1 loss at perennial power Oregon 35-1, but it sure helps to understand how much improvement you need before you become a real contender. Columbia will learn on Memorial Day May 26 what regional they will play in - the news will be broadcast on ESPNU at 12N EDT. The goal as always is to make the 8-team College World Series in Omaha starting in mid-June.

 

When I visited the Oregon campus in Eugene 14 years ago (speaking about my Branch Rickey biography), there was a sign on the stadium outfield wall that read:

Opportunity

Makeup

Attitude

Hustle

Always Put The Team First

 

No Ivy League team has ever made a Super Regional that is played the weekend before the College World Series starts, but Boretti and other Ivy League coaches believe that one year it will happen.   As I've mentioned before in this blog, the topnotch Columbia women's basketball team led by coach Megan Griffith won its first ever March Madness game this season and also its first outright Ivy League regular season title.

 

The last chance to see this very special edition of the Columbia baseball Lions will be this Saturday May 24 when Holy Cross, winners of the Patriot League, comes down from Worcester MA to play a doubleheader at Satow Stadium just north of W 218th Street and Broadway. First game starts at 1230P. 

 

Here's also a shoutout to Howard Endelman's men's tennis team that made the NCAA quarter-finals for the second year in a row.  They lost to eventual national champion Wake Forest in a highly competitive watch in Waco, Texas.  The Lions won three matches in the new Milstein Bubble in the Baker Field complex. Attendance is free at the tennis matches (and at the regular season baseball games), and I've heard that the atmosphere is very lively.  No shushing for "silence!" from judges as in the pro matches. 

 

I am especially glad to spread the good news about Columbia athletics under the direction of AD Peter Pilling because it is hard not to despair about the political polarization on campuses these days. It is part of the Trump administration's crusade to punish Columbia and other Ivy League schools and higher education in general.  Sports can be such a unifying force if we allow it to be. So once again a huge hurrah to the players, the coaches, the parents, and the loyal fans of alma mater who have brought joy and distinction in these troubled times. 

 

And now some concluding thoughts on What Has Happened To The Orioles? At 16-32 with a series at Boston starting tomorrow Fri May 23, it is unlikely that

the 2025 Orioles are a playoff team.  But there is still a lot of baseball left, and if they start playing decent defense and straighten out a woeful starting pitching rotation,

I don't think they will need to start another painful rebuild.  Certainly long-suffering Baltimore fans won't flock to see more non-competitive baseball.

 

In my last blog, I implored new Oriole owner David Rubenstein to try to re-sign Cedric Mullins, the outstanding center fielder who is the longest tenured Oriole and

lived through the difficult 100-loss seasons before the team broke out with the 101-win season in 2023.  Alas, there is no sign that Rubenstein is willing to do this.

It took too long for "President of Baseball Operations" Mike Elias to admit this week that the team had become mediocre and indeed under .500 since the middle of last summer. 

 

The firing of field manager Brandon Hyde who lived through bad times and led through the good times was inevitable. It wasn't that he "lost control of the team," a favorite cliche when a manager is fired, but he seemed stuck in the past, thinking that somehow the good times would magically return. It remains to be seen whether another young baseball lifer, third base coach Tony Mansolino, can lift the Birds at least to respectability. 

 

Despite the woes of the Orioles and the truly hapless franchises - the White Sox, the Rockies, and the Pirates - the season for most teams remains hopeful.  The Yankees and Tigers have leads of at least 5 games before games of May 22 and the double-digit winning streaks of the Twins and the Cardinals have brought both of them into contention.  Because of market size and congenital arrogance, I still hope for anything but another Yankee-Dodger World Series. But I don't always get what I want or

need.  So it goes.  Baseball remains the greatest game despite a century and a half of leadership issues. 

 

Oh yes that reminds me - what do I think of Pete Rose between taken off the ineligible list?  Yawn!  He was his own worst enemy though a great Hall of Fame worthy player.

But selling memorabilia in Cooperstown on Hall of Fame induction weekend and living the life of a gambler in Las Vegas didn't help his cause.  It remains for the writers to

decide his eligibility and there is plenty of doubt that he will ever get in. 

 

As for commissioner Rob Manfred caving in to Donald Trump's express wish in behalf of Pete Rose, Manfred is not the first executive in the USA to be very wary of what Trump wants to do. Baseball has been admirably in the forefront of the DEI programs which the new administration wants curtailed.  Manfred and the owners that pay him 

are hoping for a bonanza in streaming services.  They are not sure what policies the government will espouse in this area.  So Manfred played it cautiously.  I'm not going to get on a high horse to decry this.

 

That's all for now.  I'm heading to Cooperstown next week to talk on Frank Frisch the Fordham Flash at the Hall of Fame's annual Symposium on Baseball and American

Culture.  I'm calling my talk "Urbane Roughneck" because although Frisch was a fierce competitor on the field - known in his early years as "John McGraw's Boy" - he

was a genuine lover of classical music and good books and a devoted gardener.  His thoughts on baseball were mostly Old Guard but always delivered with intelligent passion.  

 

I have not run across any sports films on TCM but here is a list of some especially good ones being shown as part of Memorial Day programming:

Sat May 24 630P "The Steel Helmet" (1951) Director Sam Fuller's hard-hitting film set during the Korean War

Sun May 25 12M and 10A - Eddie Muller's Noir Alley presents "Cornered" (1945) Dick Powell, shedding again his bobby-soxer persona, searches for the Nazi killers of his wife

Sun May 25 8P "Bridge On the River Kwai" (1957) - the "Colonel Bogey March" will stay with you after seeing David Lean's direction of Allied prisoners of war in Japan

    during World War II with Alec Guinness/Jack Hawkins/William Holden

 

Tues May 27 1015P "Duel in the Sun" (1947) - Gregory Peck sheds his halo in a rare bad guy role with Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones

W May 28 215P "The Man Who Came To Dinner" (1942) - this film may be broadcast more often than any on TCM but it is hilarious with great performances by

Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, and Monty Woolley in the title role based on the writer Alexander Woollcott.  Jimmy Durante plays Banjo a role based on Harpo Marx.

 

That's all for now.  Always remember: Take It Easy But Take It, and even with RFK Jr raising havoc with our health systems, Stay Positive Test Negative!

 

 

 

   

     

I'm glad to report that all the news coming from my alma mater is not about the Pro-Palestine Anti-Israel demonstrations, police crackdowns, and inevitable recriminations that has created turmoil on the main college campus. Here's a shoutout instead for Columbia's baseball team, a perennial contender and six-time league champion since coach Brett Boretti arrived on Morningside Heights almost 20 years ago.

 

On the last weekend of April, the Lions clinched home field advantage in the upcoming 4-team post-season playoff by sweeping Cornell at Ithaca. There is still one regular season final home series left this coming weekend May 4-5 against second-place Princeton.  The Tigers lead the Big Red by a game with Penn's Quakers and Yale's Bulldogs another game back. 

 

One of those teams will not make the playoff that begins on Fri May 17 at picturesque Satow Stadium overlooking the Hudson a little northwest of Braodway and 218th Street.  Columbia will host the 3P game against the 4th place finisher with seeds 2 & 3 playing at 11A. We probably won't know the final four until after Harvard and Yale battle in New Haven the weekend of May 11-12.   

 

A big reason for Columbia's success has been that they always play a tough early season schedule. You learn very little from beating up on inferior competition. "To be the best you have to beat the best" is an adage that all contending teams must absorb.

 

(Megan Griffith, coach of Columbia's women's basketball regular season Ivy co-champions, has also scheduled tough early season foes. They performed so effectively this year in the early games and then soared to a 13-1 league record that the Lions earned the Ivy League's first-ever women's basketball at-large bid to March Madness.  There is also a lot of beaming at Columbia over the WNBA's Connecticut Sun drafting Abbey Hsu, Ivy League Player of the Year, and the New York LIberty's selecting former Lion Kaitlyn Davis.) 

 

After taking major lumps this season playing at the University of Florida Gators and at stops in southern California - where one of the losses was a 32-2 pasting by the UC-Irvine Anteaters - the baseball Lions enter the crucial month of May on a 9-game winning streak and a 15-3 Ivy League record. They also recently beat perennial Big East contender St. John's in a close game and routed another prominent local program, Seton Hall, 31-0. 

 

It is true that college baseball in the Northeast has never developed a huge fan base beyond parents, friends of the family, and confirmed baseball nuts like yours truly. The pinging sound of the metal bats turns off many purists and I myself do miss the resonant thwack of the wooden bat.

 

But once you make peace with this difference, I suggest you'll enjoy the quality of the game as played by these scrappy collegians. Columbia's pitching coach Tom Carty deserves kudos for turning his battered pre-season staff into an effective unit. 

 

Senior Derek Yoo from Los Angeles and junior co-captain southpaw Joe Sheets from Wilmington, Delaware, have become a reliable one-two punch as starters with sophomore Thomas Santana from Millburn, NJ locking in well recently into the third slot.  

 

The hitting has lately been overwhelming with an average of more than 8 runs a game.   A .300 hitter comes to the plate in virtually every spot in the batting order. Most have long ball power, led by senior first baseman Jack Cooper from Edwardsville, ILL, and sophomore shortstop Sam Miller from McMurray, PA (near Pittsburgh) who have each produced double-digit HR numbers. 

 

The lineup may have solidified when junior second baseman Griffin Palfrey from Vancouver, British Columbia, returned from injury.  Palfrey doubles as a relief pitcher, sometimes with closing responsibilities. 

 

There is another glow coming from the Baker Field complex with news that former Lion outfielder Hayden Schott is tearing it up in the middle of the order of the Texas A & M Aggies who have been ranked #1 in the country the last three weeks.  He is playing as a graduate student, something the Ivy League

still does not allow.  

 

It's a delight to tell these stories at a time when the university and our bedraggled body politic has been under fire.And let's be realistic, the crises will continue through USA Election Day Nov 5 and beyond.

 

I have no illusions that a winning sports team can make much societal difference.  Early in 1968 Columbia's great basketball team briefly united the campus but it blew apart by the spring at the height of the Vietnam war divisions. But I do know that winning as a team is as good a metaphor as any for what sports can teach us.

 

AND NOW TURNING TO MLB NEWS . . .

On Sat Apr 27 I was delighted to attend the press box naming ceremony for veteran Baltimore sportswriter Jim Henneman.  I've known Jim since

the mid-1970s when he was a speaker at Univ of Maryland Baltimore County in my class in Sports and American Culture, one of the first such ventures in academia. 

 

I was only one of a legion of sportswriters, friends and family who paid homage to a man whose wise counsel kept many of us from jumping off ledges when the Orioles seemed particularly hopeless.  Jim was brought to tears, reflecting on the honor bestowed upon a native son.

 

He was a batboy for the minor league Orioles and in high school pitched against another local boy Al Kaline.  The future Hall of Famer, who played his entire career with the Detroit Tigers, and the future sportswriter always engaged in friendly banter about how many times Henneman walked him. 

A longtime official scorer, Henneman gave up that duty last season. He quipped, "I can now wear Oriole orange," which indeed he did on this special day. 

 

To make the afternoon complete, the Orioles shut out the improved Oakland A's behind Cole Irvin's 7 shutout innings and back-to-back HRs by Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschman. The rest of the weekend wasn't so fortunate for the Birds as the A's rallied in the 9th inning on Fri night and Sun afternoon, treating roughly Oriole closer Craig Kimbrel who has upper back issues but may not need a trip to the injured list.   

 

Starter Grayson Rodriguez has not been so fortunate.  After pitching nearly 6 shutout innings against the Yankees this past Monday, he has been IL-ed for at least 15 days.  It looks like the Yankees and Orioles will battle for the AL East title all season with the Red Sox possibly getting into the mix with their improved pitching but they know they have to improve their defense.   

 

The problem with all these early commentaries is that there is SO MUCH of the season still to play.  And there are TOO MANY teams that qualify for the playoffs.  So it goes (sigh).  

 

I close with one special TCM movie tip.

Sa May 4 at 145P EDT the original "Angels in the Outfield" (1951) airs.  I find it a neglected gem in the baseball movie category. Starring Paul

Douglas as the crusty Pirates manager who gets humanized by Janet Leigh as a Household Tips writer for a Pittsburgh newspaper. 

 

The wonderful supporting cast includes Bruce Bennett as aging pitcher Saul Hellman, Keenan Wynn as the vitriolic broadcaster who engages in verbal and physical blows with Douglas (watch for uncredited Barbara Billingsley as a cigarette girl) and Spring Byington and Ellen Corby as the nuns who bring the orphaned girls to ballgames, most importantly, Donna Corcoran the 8-year-old who actually sees the angels in the outfield. The photography of Pittsburgh in the early 1950s is worth watching even if you are not entranced by the story.  

 

That's all for now.  Always remember: Take it easy but take it, and stay positive, test negative.