An undefeated run through the ECC postseason romped the Oyster Bay, Long Island club to a trophy-winning victory over Bridgeport and clinched the Pioneers’ second national tournament in three years, and the year eventually closed with a run through the winner’s bracket of Southern New Hampshire University’s regional in Manchester, New Hampshire. Playing through to the Regional Final, the undefeated team lost two straight games to the Penmen after first beating them in a winner’s bracket regional, but coming within a three-run loss of the Supers left little cause for a pure celebration in Nassau County.
Just seven months earlier, Long Island University’s administration decided to merge the athletics departments at its two flagship campuses in Brookville and the New York City borough of Brooklyn. LIU-Post and LIU-Brooklyn’s individual entities ceased to exist, instead replaced by a single department dubbed by the university’s overarching LIU moniker. The Division II Pioneers and Division I Blackbirds were unified, and the fallout required a strange and intertwined marriage between the various teams at both campuses.
Football, for example, moved from LIU-Post and transitioned into Division I’s championship subdivision because LIU-Brooklyn didn’t have a program. Men’s lacrosse, likewise, moved into Division I, as did men’s cross country. Other sports, though, needed to find a way to coexist, and after the 2019 season, the LIU-Post baseball team simply disappeared after folding into the LIU-Brooklyn team within the Northeast Conference.
Less than a decade later, the demarcation line drawn by the Sharks continues to illustrate a successful story embedded within an ambitious and radical change in the northeast. The LIU baseball program that began with a dozen shared trips to either a national tournament between two schools ran away from NEC competition this year and clinched its third league championship since the rebranding, and the quintessential case study of a team emerging from its peers left the Sharks with a nine-win cushion over the NEC’s fifth place team. Running through the four-team league championship with two wins over Fairleigh Dickinson included a 10-plus run effort in each of LIU’s final six games, and the team twice cleared 20 runs against the second place Knights. Its 22-8 win in the postseason championship run-ruled a team into the national tournament, and that game started with a seven-run first inning that ended FDU’s threat before the game truly started.
That said, LIU failed to defeat San Diego State, Jacksonville or Army in its games against teams trending closer to the mid-major line, and its 7-6 loss to Rider was the only 2026 matchup against a tournament team. A single 2024 win over Miami still stands as the Sharks’ only victory over a team currently in a Power Four league, and last year’s blowout losses pushed memories of the 2022 win over Washington State further into the background.
Even without a previous game against Boston College, the elimination nature of Saturday’s game adds a new chapter to both teams at a time when northeast baseball is increasingly present on the national stage. As an NEC power, the Sharks are a well-traveled and well-earned team with a championship pedigree. As a low-major, playing an ACC team that bordered on hosting a regional for most of the season is an intriguing challenge. As an elimination game, anything can – and oftentimes does – happen.
On with the preview:
*****
Around The Horn
LIU’s roster carries layers of organic nuance because the Sharks didn’t play a power conference opponent before the segmented First Round matchup against Georgia, and the roster turnover is such that its construction is a case study for finding potential raw players who are refined through a flexible and malleable system built to incorporate reclaimed top prospects. Leading hitter Nick Matson, for example, began his career as a two-way prospect for West Virginia for transferring to Lackawanna College for two years. A former No. 40 overall prospect from Pennsylvania’s rich state didn’t play for the Mountaineers because of an injury, but his two years with the Falcons provided the backdrop for a .364 season during this year’s reentry with LIU.
Beyond him, Cord Dobrinski transferred from Grayson College and became one of LIU’s better power hitters with more playing time in 2026, and Joe Durso joined the Sharks after leaving St. John’s for Hartford Community College in Maryland. Matthew McGuirk, meanwhile, was more homegrown who remained on Long Island after playing high school baseball in his hometown of Commack, New York.
Any team entering the national tournament with a .300 average and 450-odd runs scored possesses a formula capable of plating runs in bunches, but the inherent knock against LIU worked to the forefront when Georgia took a no-hitter through a six-inning start to Friday night. A single run scored after Noah Sorensen was hit by a pitch and advanced on a walk and a fielder’s choice before scoring on a passed ball. – not exactly a full-blown run production in the offense.
LIU trailed the host Bulldogs by a 13-0 score when that happened, so it’s also unclear if the NEC team was singularly overwhelmed by Georgia starting pitcher Joey Volchoko or if a combination of factors worked into the Shark’s sticker shock. Even in a situation where Volchko – a Stanford transfer – was a top-rated draft prospect capable of drawing comparisons to Noah Syndergaard, his four-pitch repertoire relied more heavily on a plus-fastball and plus-slider to stop LIU’s offense from ever gaining a foothold. That said, trailing a team by a dozen runs forces hitters to get more aggressive and lose patience at the plate, so it’s important to watch if BC can replicate that success for Tyler Mudd.
*****
On The Bump
Elimination games are an “all hands on deck” situation, so running through five different arms across the two-day game against Georgia likely won’t impact how LIU deploys its starting rotation or long relievers. Starting pitcher Nicholas Finarelli is probably the only option that’s truly unavailable after throwing 76 pitches against the Bulldogs, but Dominic Vassallo regains eligibility after throwing 20-plus pitches in yesterday’s fifth inning. Vassallo being one of the most reliable relievers means that he can bridge a staff that used semi-reliever Nicolas Bernhardt during the First Round resumption.
That said, the Sharks don’t run particularly deep into their staff. They entered the national tournament with a team ERA that was just under seven runs per game, and their team WHIP pushed closer to 2.00. Both of those metrics place them in the lower third of college baseball, and few – if any teams – outside of Virginia Tech qualified for the NCAA Tournament with worse numbers. Throwing into the mix that the majority of those numbers came against mid-major or low-major opponents doesn’t help the cause.
The needle therefore tilts heavily towards Boston College’s lineup, but the funk enveloping Birdball’s overall slump is an equalizer for Saturday’s elimination game despite context clues steering things back towards a BC breakout. Liberty starter Ben Blair, for example, burned pitches against the BC lineup, and the Eagles began juicing the yard when he began to tire.
Circumstantially-speaking, the three-homer day actually ran against Todd Interdonato‘s stated desire for an offense to generate rhythm, and Friday’s loss to the Flames included a greater need for something bigger than a one-swing equalizer. Nobody ever declines home runs, but the early innings will require BC to work through counts and chase pitchers.
*****
Meteorology 101
LIU’s game against Georgia found itself suspended to Saturday morning after inclement Friday night weather in Athens forced rain-related delays. Stuck in the sixth inning, the Sharks trailed the Dawgs by a 15-1 deficit after Rylan Lujo blasted UGA’s sixth home run of the game, and that meant Georgia had to play the final three-plus innings at 9 a.m. before retreating to its clubhouse a scheduled break ahead of its winner’s bracket game against Liberty.
Any impact to Georgia’s expected win over LIU throws unanticipated wrenches into both the Bulldogs and the Sharks, especially with more rain in the early morning forecast in Athens. A window is going to open for the midday elimination game, but persistent rain into Saturday night would cause the loser of the winner’s bracket game to drop down to a game against either BC or LIU with an expected doubleheader for a winning team on Sunday. Sunday’s schedule, after all, states that the loser’s bracket game starts early enough to ensure that the loser’s bracket winner plays its first game against the winner’s bracket winner in the afternoon Regional Final.
I guess it could always be worse. Massachusetts temperatures dropped below 50 degrees during Saturday’s overnight hours, and 50 mph coastal wind gusts offer a chill big enough to make the Commonwealth feel like it’s in the low-30s. Some snow is expected to fly across the higher elevations of Massachusetts, three days after we almost hit 90 degrees in Boston.
*****
Around The Tournament
Weather wreaked additional havoc in the Atlanta Regional located to the south of Athens by forcing the full-fledged postponement of Oklahoma’s game against The Citadel. Forced to play at 10 a.m on Sunday, the loser of that game is being forced into a 2 p.m. start against UIC, which was destroyed by Georgia Tech. The second-ranked Yellow Jackets, meanwhile, await the winner of the game between the middle seeds, thereby creating a tripleheader at Russ Chandler Stadium.
Ole Miss, meanwhile, endured a rain delay for its Lincoln Regional game against Arizona State while Miami’s game against Troy was pushed back to 10 p.m. after weather arrived in the aftermath of the wild game between Florida and Rider. Delays likewise impacted Auburn’s game against Milwaukee and the Sunshine State games featuring Central Florida’s matchup with NC State and Florida State’s game against St. John’s.
Top-ranked UCLA didn’t have a rain delay but probably hoped for one after losing a shocking, 3-2 decision to Saint Mary’s in the first round. Elsewhere, the delay in Auburn didn’t help the Tigers avoid a 13-8 upset at the hands of the sub-.500 Panthers, and Little Rock upended the No. 9 national seed with a 7-4 win over Southern Mississippi. Over at Dick Howser Stadium, the delay in Tallahassee didn’t stop the Johnnies from upsetting No. 10 Florida State in a huge win for the Big East. All of those teams now drop into the loser’s bracket and are forced, like BC, to go the proverbial long way to the Super Regional round.
Looking at some other results, Oregon State lost to Washington State in the Eugene Regional hosted by Oregon, and South Carolina Upstate defeated Oklahoma State in the Tuscaloosa Regional. In Chapel Hill, East Carolina went 14 innings in a wild matchup with Tennessee before prevailing with a 7-3 finish, and No. 15 Kansas held serve over Northeastern to advance to play Arkansas in a winner’s bracket game.
Among other New England-based teams, Patriot League champion Holy Cross lost big to Texas, and Ivy League champion Yale lost its First Round game at Oregon.
*****
Non-Baseball Story of the Day
My daughter’s preschool class held its annual talent show on Friday morning, and if you’re not familiar with a preschool talent show, I’ll try to size it up for you by simply saying that’s a delightful brand of chaos. Kids hold varying degrees of fear or excitement about performing for their parents and friends, and it’s impossible to mask those emotions when you’re a five-year-old lacking the restrictor plate regulator that exists in mature adults…supposedly, at least.
My daughter is a natural ham in front of a crowd to the degree that we have to remind her that she’s not always in the spotlight, but my wife and I delighted in watching her attempt to hula hoop in front of the crowd. She earlier performed a dance with her classroom and saved her big finish for the class rendition of “Golden.” If you’re a parent with children, you just started hearing K-Pop Demon Hunters in YOUR EVER-LOVING NIGHTMARES.
Seriously, I love my kids and don’t criticize their taste in music because, well, they’re five and three, but this year’s constantly blitzed me with that soundtrack. I actually wound up sitting down to watch the movie to contextualize my morning routine a little bit better, and while it’s not terrible, it’s also not necessarily the top selection on my Netflix account. That said, the soundtrack slaps…I just didn’t expect to listen to it on a daily basis.
This is where being a #girldad is a different tune from my childhood. Growing up as a boy in the early 1990s meant that my mother spent far too many hours hulking up around the dinner table while we listened to Rick Derringer sing Real American for Hulk Hogan, and I’m pretty sure that I received more than one Macho Man Randy Savage flying elbow from the top bunk of my brother’s bedroom. I’ve been in a Sharpshooter and been kicked in the chin because we needed to reenact a Sweet Chin Music or two.
None of that happens with my girls. They love doing artwork and only occasionally jumping off of the furniture while they listen and sing along to a soundtrack from a movie that they’ve never actually seen. Having watched it by myself, I’m okay with that. I’m okay with everything. We’re going up, up, up, it’s our moment, am I right?
*****
Dan’s Batting Practice Song and Final Thought
Well, way down yonder on the Chattahoochee,
It gets hotter than a hoochie coochie.
We laid rubber on the Georgia asphalt,
We got a little crazy but we never got caught.
-Alan Jackson, “Chattahoochee”
Speaking of music, sending Boston College to a regional in the Deep South reinvigorated my love for older country music by reviving some old baseball playlists that were buried deep within my Spotify library. Listening to Alan Jackson, Brooks and Dunn, Garth Brooks and Vince Gill rightly brought me back, therefore, to a time when I snuck downstairs to watch ESPN’s Speed World in the middle of the night. The adage at the time declared that cars “won on Sunday and sold on Monday,” so those old Luminas, Monte Carlos and Thunderbirds brought a hint of down-home Southern romance to a Boston city kid who didn’t understand the rolling southern hills and rural settings around race tracks that frankly didn’t exist in my backyard.
Laying down rubber on the racetracks allowed drivers to run wide open – they used a much more explicit term to describe it – when tracks grew more humid. They laid down grip on the track that later helped preserve wheels when the speeds pulled them further to the front of the apron, essentially meaning that laying down rubber allowed cars to run faster for longer periods of time. At least that’s how I remember it.
Losing to Liberty wasn’t exactly an ideal start to the NCAA Tournament, but I think BC learned valuable lessons during its comeback and eventual defeat to the Flames. The bats started to turn the corner, and I’m convinced that a rhythm-building win is exactly what the team needs to get moving forward. Getting that against LIU would help stage a massive jump into the next round, and I think the LIU pitching is going to present opportunities for the bats to gain some momentum.
Whether or not that actually happens is the beautiful part of baseball and why the games aren’t decided until they’re actually played, so I think the start of Saturday’s game is key to laying down some rubber on the Georgia asphalt. For three glorious innings in the middle of Friday’s game, BC figured out how to hit around Foley Field. Using that information against LIU is now paramount to ensuring that the season extends for one more game and a shot at a Regional Final.
Boston College and LIU are scheduled to play in an elimination game of the 2026 NCAA Division I Baseball Tournament on Saturday, May 30, 2026, from Foley Field in Athens, Ga. Playing as the road team for the first time in this year’s postseason, the Eagles will face the Sharks at 12 p.m. on the ESPN+ subscription that’s available through the network’s family of Internet and mobile device apps.
