Baseball: Tigers to face No. 7 Texas in NCAA Tournament

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After winning the Ivy League championship and earning a place in the NCAA Tournament, the baseball team waited for more than three weeks to learn its postseason draw. That wait came to an end on Monday afternoon. Princeton drew the fourth seed in the University of Texas regional and will play the No. 7 Longhorns in Austin, Texas on Friday.

No. 2-seed Kent State, which won the MAC championship, and No. 3-seed and Southland Conference champion Texas State join Princeton and Texas in the regional. These four teams will play a double-elimination tournament for the right to advance to the Super Regionals. The 16 teams that qualify for the Super Regionals will play a three-game series, narrowing the field down to eight for the College World Series.

Princeton went a league-best 15-5 in Ivy League play, winning the Lou Gehrig Division by five games and earning a spot in the Ivy League Championship Series. They faced two-time defending champion and Red Rolfe Division winner Dartmouth in the championship, which was played at Clarke Field, as the Tigers had the better conference record. Though the Big Green won the second game with a late-inning comeback, Princeton handily took the first and third games to become Ivy League champions.

The Tigers are making their first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2006. That year, they played Oklahoma State and host Arkansas, losing a pair of low-scoring games. Princeton’s last NCAA Tournament victory came in 2004, when Ross Ohlendorf ’06 held host University of Virginia to two runs in 8.2 innings, allowing the Tigers to pull a 4-2 upset.

This is Princeton’s 11th NCAA Tournament appearance in program history and its sixth since 2000.

The Tigers (23-22) will face Texas (43-15), the tournament’s seventh overall seed, on Friday. If they win, they will face the winner of Kent State and Texas State on Saturday; if they lose, they will face the loser of that game on Saturday. Freshman Mike Ford and sophomore Zak Hermans will likely start Princeton’s first two games.