A family affair for me in small college baseball
The Division III baseball playoffs turned out to be something that hit home
While two of my brothers and I graduated from a rather large school, UCLA, my oldest brother, Jim, was a very proud alum of Pomona College. Jim would “borrow” UCLA as a school to root for in televised college athletics, but he always checked in on his beloved Sagehens even long after he moved away from Southern Califonia, eventually settling in Holland, Michigan.
Pomona, for those not familiar with it, is a very selective small liberal arts college which is part of a six college consortium in Claremont, California, called simply The Claremont Colleges. For athletic purposes, the NCAA allows Pomona to pair up with another college, Pitzer, and the athletic teams are listed as Pomona-Pitzer.1
Pomona-Pitzer for most of its existence was not an athletic powerhouse. They play in the Southern Calfornia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, better known as the SCIAC. But, in recent years, the school has had pretty good football and basketball teams and has also been very strong in cross country, track, tennis, golf, and water polo.
Baseball has never been a big sport at Pomona and the school has produced a total of one player who ever played in the major leagues. His name was Harry Kingman and you are contractually obligated to click on the link for the biography I wrote about him.
This year, Pomona-Pitzer had a pretty good baseball team, finishing the regular season 32-11 and in second place in the SCIAC at 17-7. The Sagehens won the conference tournament over regular season champ La Verne and got a spot in the NCAA Division III baseball tournament.
There are a lot of Division III conferences that have automatic qualifiers. There are 41 of them. The tournament, for some reason, does not have the total number of teams in the tournament be a power of 2. Instead, there are 60 teams. There are 14 groups of four that compete like most NCAA baseball or softball regional where it is double elimination and one team moves on to a super-regional.
Pomona-Pitzer was put into one of the two-team regionals. Those were a best of five series. Who did the Sagehens draw? They drew Willamette College of Salem, Oregon, where my brother’s oldest daughter graduated from (I’m not using their names since I didn’t ask ahead of time, they will likely be amused by this.) The series was played in Claremont and Pomona-Pitzer dropped the first game and then stormed back to win the final three, the last one by a 24-10 margin. The Sagehens scored in every inning by the ninth in that game.
When I looked at the rest of the bracket, I saw other colleges where nephews and niecs attended. My oldest nephew attended Denison University in Granille, Ohio, The Big Red were the #2 team in the country and they easily won their regional, beating Hanover and Rowan by scores of 15-1, 26-7, and 13-0.
Another niece of mine, my brother Tom’s daughter, attended Case Western University in Cleveland. The Spartans hosted a regional with defending champion Lynchburg (the much smaller school in that city in Virginia), Alvernia (Reading, PA), and Ithaca (of upstate New York). Despite being the 7th ranked team in the country, Case Western, lost twice to regional champ Lynchburg to be eliminated.
The next round was the super regionals. These were much simpler. Eight pairs of team playing a best of three over two days. The eight winners would go to the championship series in Eastlake, Ohio starting on May 31.
Pomona-Pitzer was sent out to Marshall, Texas to play East Texas Baptist University. The Sagehens opened their season there and won two of three. But the Tigers were higher ranked and got the home field advantage. It turned out not to matter as Pomona-Pitzer won both games by scores of 6-4 and 8-7. In the second game, Sagehen first baseman Isaac Kim went 5 for 5 and hit for the cycle. For the first time in school history, Pomona-Pitzer had made it to the Division III baseball championship series.
Would my nephew’s college, Denison, be joining them? Sadly no, The Big Red were shocked by Birmingham-Southern in two straight games. Birmingham-Southern, the Panthers, is going out of business on May 31, the day the championship series starts. Whenever the baseball season ends for Birmingham-Southern ends, the school disappears.
Birmingham-Southern’s top pitcher is Drake LaRoche. Back in 2016, Drake LaRoche’s father, Adam, retired from his MLB job with the Chicago White Sox the team ordered him to stop bringing his son, Drake, into the clubhouse, pretty much all the time. I don’t know if Drake LaRoche is a pro prospect (I would suspect not), but I wonder if his father would follow him around all the time in the minor leagues. Or perhaps, you know, let his son grow up on his own terms.
Joining Pomona-Pitzer and Birmingham-Southern in the Division III Championship Series are:
top ranked Endicott College of Beverly, MA. The Gulls have lost just two games all year
Wisconsin-Whitewater, a Division III powerhouse in all sports, who beat fellow University of Wisconsin system member, La Crosse, to advance. They are the Warhawks and they won a championship in 2005.
Misericordia2 of Dallas, PA The Cougars most notable alum is Alaska governor Mike Dunleavy)
Salve Regina3 of Newport, RI. The Seahawks most notable alum is Betty Hutton, who got a psychology degree there after she quit acting.
The University of Lynchburg, which is in the same city as the much bigger and much newer Liberty University. They are the Hornets.
Randolph-Macon College of Ashland, Virginia, which plays in the same conference as Lynchburg, the Old Dominion Athletic Conference. And like Lynchburg, they also have a stinging insect nickname, the Yellow Jackets.
So my rooting interest in this championship series is no longer divided. I will be rooting for Pomona-Pitzer. As I right this, I don’t know how the championship series will be seeded. It is similar to the College World Series in Omaha with two groups of four playing double elimination and the winners of each group facing off in a best of three.
I feel I need to follow how Pomona is doing for Jim, who passed away in 2015. I know he would have figured out a way to get from his home in Western Michigan to suburban Cleveland to go root on the Sagehens. I will likely have to follow from home on live streams that the NCAA provides. I would handicap a winner but for the most part, I just learned where most of these schools are.
But maybe this is just the year of the Sagehen.
Which looks like this in real life:
Picture of a female sage grouse from the Macaulay Library
Three of the other six schools compete as Claremont-Mudd-Scripps. They are Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, and Scripps. The sixth school is a gradaute school only and doesn’t get to play . The Claremont Colleges are not affiliated at all with the Claremont Institute, which is a good thing.
It means “mercy” in Latin.
Where the football team has an offense heavily dependent on Hail Mary passes.