Baseball Team Faces B.U. in NCAA Tilt

The Harvard baseball team will play Boston University tomorrow at the University of Connecticut in the first round of the NCAA District I playoffs.

Both teams will go with their pitching aces--Ray Peters (7-1) for Harvard and Tim Masick (4-0, 0.89 ERA) for B.U. The loser of this game will stay at the ballpark and play the loser of this afternoon's Connecticut-Providence game.

The winners of the two first round games will play Wednesday and then the tournament will continue on a "round-robin" basis until three of the teams have lost twice. The surviving team then goes to Omaha, Neb.; for the national finals.

Harvard, the Eastern League champion, was 16-7 for the season. Among the seven losses was an early-season 5-1 setback at the Terriers' (10-5 overall) hands. Masick beat Peters in that game, but the Harvard ace has gotten much stronger since then. B.U.'s pitching coach Bob Crocker isn't worried, though, "We beat him once so why not twice," he said, "he's great but he's human."

Harvard's hitting has not been over-powering for most of the season. In the last few weeks before (the possibly damaging) exam period break, however, both Dick Manchester and Jeff Grate began to find their eyes.

Manchester wound up as Eastern League batting champion, Grate made the Greater Boston League All-Star team along with Bill Cobb and captain Carter Lord and the defense began to work well together, pulling off at least three double plays in each of the last four games.

Come Back

Harvard coach Norm Shepard has returned from Florida to coach the team in tomorrow's game. Loyal Park, who will succeed Shepard as head coach next year, has been running the drills for the past week.

Some observers pick Connecticut as the team to beat. The Huskies have two good pitchers, Ed Baird and Bill Hogerty, and some solid hitting, including George Greer, who was mentioned on several All-America teams last year.