Hey guys,
Really looking forward to this weekend's series against Cornell and thought I'd share my insights. I'm c.o. 2012 and was a diehard Raggie when I was in school, and now I'm in grad school at Cornell.
The first thing to know about Cornell baseball is that they are BAD. Like really, really bad. The program is about 200 games below .500 over their ~150 year history. The program has had 14 players drafted since 1965. Three of those were drafted last year, the most in school history (the earliest of those picks was in the 26th round and the only junior drafted opted to forego his senior season). Cornell has been to the NCAA tournament twice in its history (1977 and 2012) and the most recent appearance was as a 4 seed and they were bounced in two games.
Baseball is a complete afterthought as an athletic program. Actually football is an afterthought and baseball is somewhere well down the ladder from that. Hockey is the only sport people care about here, and the team is admittedly very good. They locked up their 22nd Ivy League title this year with over a month left in the season, swept bitter rival Harvard and are in the driver's seat to win the ECAC (the larger conference that all the Ivy schools are in). They're #4 in the country receiving votes for 1st, and will hopefully get a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament. The hockey fans are actually very similar to our Raggies in that they heckle mercilessly (opposing goalie gets it the worst) and there are several fun chants and traditions like letting the goalie know that a goal scored on him was all his fault, throwing fish at Harvard, and serenading the opposing goalie before the 3rd period.
The home ballpark for Cornell (Hoy Field), is a little field squeezed between a parking garage and Bill Gates Hall, and it seats fewer people than most Texas high school JV fields. To be fair though they just installed some nice new field turf.
Some more fun facts about Cornell:
Cornell is the biggest Ivy League school (enrollment just north of 20k) and the newest by almost 100 years (founded 1865)
Cornell is actually New York's Morrill Land Grant school (same reconstruction-era act that led to A&M's founding) and the school is part private and part public, with outstanding veterinary and agriculture programs
Cornell is located in Ithaca, NY which is a little hippie town on Cayuga Lake in the Finger Lakes region about an hour south of Syracuse
The town motto is "Ithaca is Gorges" because of all of the gorges cut out of the shale rock in the region, including two on either side of campus. The bridges that span these gorges have suicide nets because apparently there used to be a bad problem with overwhelmed engineering students suffering from seasonal affective disorder during the brutal winters...
Ithaca was the starting point of the movie Road Trip, where a group of college friends start at their fictional university (modeled after Ithaca College) and drive to Austin to intercept a package sent to one of their girlfriends
Lastly, you may have heard of Cornell in the news lately, as one of our fraternities had a "pig roast" that didn't go over so well...
Enjoy the series, Ags! I'll be watching from afar.
Really looking forward to this weekend's series against Cornell and thought I'd share my insights. I'm c.o. 2012 and was a diehard Raggie when I was in school, and now I'm in grad school at Cornell.
The first thing to know about Cornell baseball is that they are BAD. Like really, really bad. The program is about 200 games below .500 over their ~150 year history. The program has had 14 players drafted since 1965. Three of those were drafted last year, the most in school history (the earliest of those picks was in the 26th round and the only junior drafted opted to forego his senior season). Cornell has been to the NCAA tournament twice in its history (1977 and 2012) and the most recent appearance was as a 4 seed and they were bounced in two games.
Baseball is a complete afterthought as an athletic program. Actually football is an afterthought and baseball is somewhere well down the ladder from that. Hockey is the only sport people care about here, and the team is admittedly very good. They locked up their 22nd Ivy League title this year with over a month left in the season, swept bitter rival Harvard and are in the driver's seat to win the ECAC (the larger conference that all the Ivy schools are in). They're #4 in the country receiving votes for 1st, and will hopefully get a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament. The hockey fans are actually very similar to our Raggies in that they heckle mercilessly (opposing goalie gets it the worst) and there are several fun chants and traditions like letting the goalie know that a goal scored on him was all his fault, throwing fish at Harvard, and serenading the opposing goalie before the 3rd period.
The home ballpark for Cornell (Hoy Field), is a little field squeezed between a parking garage and Bill Gates Hall, and it seats fewer people than most Texas high school JV fields. To be fair though they just installed some nice new field turf.
Some more fun facts about Cornell:
Cornell is the biggest Ivy League school (enrollment just north of 20k) and the newest by almost 100 years (founded 1865)
Cornell is actually New York's Morrill Land Grant school (same reconstruction-era act that led to A&M's founding) and the school is part private and part public, with outstanding veterinary and agriculture programs
Cornell is located in Ithaca, NY which is a little hippie town on Cayuga Lake in the Finger Lakes region about an hour south of Syracuse
The town motto is "Ithaca is Gorges" because of all of the gorges cut out of the shale rock in the region, including two on either side of campus. The bridges that span these gorges have suicide nets because apparently there used to be a bad problem with overwhelmed engineering students suffering from seasonal affective disorder during the brutal winters...
Ithaca was the starting point of the movie Road Trip, where a group of college friends start at their fictional university (modeled after Ithaca College) and drive to Austin to intercept a package sent to one of their girlfriends
Lastly, you may have heard of Cornell in the news lately, as one of our fraternities had a "pig roast" that didn't go over so well...
Enjoy the series, Ags! I'll be watching from afar.
