The Cardinal and White teams before the game. (Photo: Mac)

On a gloomy-then-sunny day in Palo Alto, Stanford took the field at Sunken Diamond.

Those familiar with Stanford sports know that their football team plays an annual Cardinal and White game every spring.

On Feb 11th, it was Stanford baseball’s turn. Their first ever Cardinal and White game took place at Klein Field at Sunken Diamond.

» Continue reading “The First Ever Stanford Baseball Cardinal And White Scrimmage”

College Baseball Daily comes through yet again, this time with full coverage of Baseball Media Day, an annual event in Northern California in which six major college baseball teams meet up and talk about the upcoming season. Stanford hosted the conference this year, which I would have loved to go to except I kind of live in New Jersey.

Anyways, here’s CBD’s interview with our beloved Mark “Nine” Marquess:

Guys, you have to listen to this. I mean, you have to. It’s Nine doing an awesome interview with the lovely people at College Baseball 360.

It’s really interesting to hear him talk about adding scholarships to baseball, actually. He points out that baseball gets less scholarships than basketball and football, but he also explains that this actually allows other schools to be more competitive because less scholarship spaces mean that more prospects go to more schools.

Eleven days until we start playing baseball. You know you’re excited. We’re excited.

Again, this is the only available picture.

Merry Christmas, everyone! As your present this year, we’re bringing you a really awesome guy with a really awesome name.

This is Geo Saba. There are no videos or pictures of him out there on the great wide interwebs. I’m a really expert researcher and I found nothing. His Stanford profile page houses the only photo that I could legally use.

I was able to find a few links, but they don’t really give us much insight, either, other than the fact that Geo plays first base:

• Yahoo! Rivals (At least here we find out he has a 4.1 GPA.)
• MaxPreps.com, which does have some photos (which are watermarked)
• Headfirst Baseball
• A Twitter account that may or may not be his

Stanford tells us that he hit .429 as a junior, which is more than acceptable and makes me pretty excited. So does his 4.1 GPA. He sounds like a good fit at first base over here at the Farm.

Welcome to Stanford, Geo – you definitely have one of the coolest names on the team right now!

And since it’s Christmas today, here’s a festive video featuring Nine and some other coaches dancing.

We think he should be number one. Some people are just plain stupid, though.

Here’s the article if you want to check it out. Quoth the writer:

Despite Stanford’s demanding academic standards and baseball’s limited scholarships, the former Stanford All-America first baseman has led his alma mater to 12 Pac-10 titles and 14 College World Series appearances. In addition to the Cardinal’s two national titles, Stanford also has finished second in Omaha three times. Marquess also coached the United States to the Olympic gold medal in 1988.

Basically, they’re saying we’re really smart and Nine is good at channeling our intelligence. I think. Or something like that.

Anyway, send Nine your congratulations on making this list despite the fact that the newspaper is from SoCal.

UCLA is ranked 11th in the country right now. ELEVENTH. And we beat them.

7-4′s your final. That’s because we hit a few homers the other night. We got ‘em from Jones and Piscotty and Gaffney. And then Mark Appel went seven innings and only gave up three runs. So basically we played really good baseball and beat the team we were supposed to lose to.

Check out what Nine had to say about it, courtesy of College Baseball Daily:

Also worth mentioning – Arizona State beat Cal in seventeen innings last night. Read up on that here. Sounds like it was a game for the ages and I really wish we had an ASU baseball writer because she and I would have lots of Pac-10 fun.

Yeah. That first game against Washington State, where Mark Appel left with an 8-2 lead? Let’s forget about that one. It didn’t go as planned. Walk-off homers from the other team kind of put a damper on things.

Now that second game – let’s talk about that one. Jordan Pries struck out a season-high seven batters over five innings, and despite the fact that  there was snow – yes, snow – the Cardinal ended up scoring 22 runs. They haven’t scored over 20 since April of 2008, which they did against USC. (2008 means they still had players like Jed Lowrie and John Mayberry Jr. on the roster. That makes this fairly impressive.) Ragira had a grand slam and seven RBIs, Lonnie Kauppila had six hits and drove in five runs, and Austin Wilson went 4-6 and drove in four more. That’s sixteen of the runs right there.

Basically, that game was good.

And the third one – oh, the third one. You see, the third one gave Nine his 1400th career win, and that’s why it’s easily the most important one in this series despite the high-scoring affair from the day before. After taking a 4-0 lead, errors allowed Washington State to creep back into it before Chris Reed shut them down with a five-out save. And of course, Dean McArdle started this one, which means he still refuses to lose a game. Ever.

A couple of notes:

• Zach Jones, who had been struggling to open the season, drove in seven runs between Friday and Saturday after having just one RBI the entire season up to this point.
• Kenny Diekroeger has a 14-game hitting streak. Keep tabs on Kenny.
• Stanford is playing San Jose State on Tuesday at home before heading off to USC for the weekend. The San Jose State game starts at 5:30 pm PST.
• There are six players and two GMs in the Majors right now who hail from Stanford. I’m sure at some point this season you will hear about all of them here, because Steph is crazy.