Springfield Game Today To Test Pitching Staff

Baseball coach Norm Shepard will be looking for a pitcher today when his hard-hitting nine travels west for a 3 p.m. contest at Springfield College. The Crimson lineup is well-set down to the number one pinch hitter, but Shepard has yet to find a stopper or any clear order among his seven hurlers.

Shepard plans to test three pitchers against the Maroons: junior Larry Melfa and sophomores Jim Sersich and Tom Munzel.

Malfa turned in the strongest performance of the southern trip, shutting out Stetson College on a one-hitter last Friday. In the second game of that double-header, Sersich followed with a seven-inning shutout of his own.

A strong stint will shove any of these three to the fore of Shepard's thinking, especially after the poor showings Saturday at Penn by Jim McCandlish and John Scott, the mainstays of last year's Crimson staff.

The other two twirlers who are very much in the picture are sophomore Bob Lincoln and junior Paul Thornton, who pitched three innings apiece in Harvard's 1-0 shutout of Florida Southern last Thursday.

But once he finds what combination he wants from the mound corps, Shepard will be all set. The Florida trip turned the team's two sophomore question marks into exclamation points.

Jeff Grate, replacing graduated Tom Bilodeau at shortstop, hit a phenomenal 542 with 13 hits in the first seven games. Bob Welz, who is freeing last year's first baseman Joe O'Donnell for the catching duties, is batting an even .400, with a homer and triple.

Welz, a left-handed swinger as is Grate, is being moved up to the cleanup spot for today's game, ahead of slow-starting Dan Hootstein. The junior right fielder, who led the team with a .325 average last season, hit a disappointing .158 in the opening games.

Sophomore outfielder Carter Lord hit .375 with a triple, but will have a tough time breaking up the outfield of Hootstein, George Neville and John Dockery.

Today's game with Springfield, a 5-6 victim last year, will provide a measure of how far the Crimson, and especially it pitchers, has to go before it fulfills its high potential.