On Redemption and Rewriting History
By Kumar Nambiar, minor leaguer in the Oakland Athletics organization,@kumar4123
I remember it so clearly. Princeton had just scored the winning run. A walk-off to win the league title on their own field. Game over. Series over. Championship lost. It had been a long time since Yale had won the Ivy League Championship Series, and the drought had continued. For the seniors, it was the end. The end of a long four-year career. Even as a freshman it was devastating for me, but I knew that I had more baseball to look forward to. That memory of losing to Princeton stuck with me the summer and fall leading up to the following season.
Looking back through sports history, there have been a number of teams that lost a championship and won the championship the following year. In 2014, the Kansas City Royals lost the World Series to Madison Bumgarner and the San Francisco Giants. The Royals had gotten the tying run to third base in the last inning of Game 7 but couldn’t drive him in; the Giants won the Series. The following year, the Royals made it back to the Fall Classic and they took down the New York Mets in 5 games to win the Series. In 2016, the North Carolina Tar Heels lost a heartbreaker at the final second to the Villanova Wildcats in the NCAA Tournament Championship game. I remember the buzzer-beating three-point shot so clearly. The following year, UNC made it back to the National Championship game; they beat the top-ranked Gonzaga Bulldogs and cut down the nets.
Every college basketball and Major League Baseball team in the country has the same goal: to win the last game of March Madness or the World Series. They all know how hard it is to make the postseason, let alone make it to the championship, but these teams did it in back to back years. Why? Because the second year, they had a very similar roster as the year prior, and the returning players came back with more experience, more determination, and the taste of losing fresh in their memory.
I thought a lot about these teams after we lost our Championship and had a feeling that we were going to come back stronger. My older teammates saw the opportunity as well. Most of our starting lineup was back, as well as our pitchers.
Unfortunately, the spring did not start how we would have liked. By our third weekend, we found ourselves 3-9. Our pre-league schedule was supposed to be challenging. However, losing that much at the beginning of the season was demoralizing. While we were frustrated, we continued to work hard and soon hit a turning point; things began to click. Our record the rest of the year was 31-9. We finished league play with a 16-4 record and the first overall seed. As a result, we got to host the Ivy League Championship at Yale. I was scheduled to start the third game of the three-game series. It turned out that I would never need to throw a pitch.
Our experience from the previous year had prepared us for this moment. It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon for baseball and game one set the tone for the series. Our ace threw a complete game shutout, 5-0. His best outing of the year – and the most dominant pitching performance I had ever seen – came at the perfect time. The previous year, we had won the first game and then lost the next two. However, this year was going to be different. Once again, the Yale Bulldogs were one win away.
Since we hosted the series, we were scheduled to be the away team in game two, which started approximately thirty minutes after our game one victory. We scored four runs in the top of the first inning. It all happened so fast that the opposing team couldn’t get their bullpen arms ready in time. We scored six more runs in the third inning and had scored ten runs before they could score their first. That was enough run support to win the game and to win the Ivy League Championship.
In the 9th inning, the last batter swung through a fastball for the final out. Our catcher threw his glove and charged towards our pitcher. The dugout emptied; I had never seen some of my teammates move that quickly before. It was a race to the mound to see who could get into the dogpile first. Seconds later, my thirty best friends were stacked on top of each other. The celebration on the field lasted for hours; no one wanted to leave. That day will always be one of my favorite baseball memories. We had watched Princeton raise the trophy the year before. This time, it was ours.
Just like the Tar Heels and the Royals, we redeemed ourselves. It was a win for the history books and it was our first Ivy League title since 1994. 23 years later, Yale Baseball was back on top.