Conference Clash
JMU travels to Boston to face Northeastern
By Matthew Stoss, senior writer
Posted on April 6, 2006

Someone forgot to tell the Colonial Athletic Association about the Northeastern baseball team. Sure, the league knew it was joining, but three months into the season, the Huskies are sitting in second place after a weekend sweep of 21-9 and perennial baseball power North Carolina-Wilmington.

So given last weekend’s happenings, could it be said that Northeastern is a surprise?

“Absolutely,” said JMU coach Spanky McFarland, whose Diamond Dukes open a three-game series with the Huskies Friday in Boston.

Northeastern (7-2 in the Colonial, 12-9 overall) has won eight out of their last 10, including two-consecutive CAA series sweeps over Delaware March 24 to 26 and then Wilmington this past weekend.

“[UNCW] almost could’ve won,” McFarland said. “They didn’t get a lot of two-out hits, and a lot of that is being comfortable. It’s a long way up there.”

The Diamond Dukes (9-3, 20-11 ), who were on a six-game losing skid before beating Radford yesterday, make their way up there Friday, where third-place JMU will try to rebound from a weekend sweep by No. 16 Old Dominion as ranked by Baseball America. The sweep came on the heels of a three-game win streak and before that, a 16-game win streak, which at the time was the longest in the nation. After dropping three straight in Norfolk, the Monarchs (12-0, 29-3), who sit in first place in the CAA, now own that distinction having won 18 in a row.

Said McFarland, “I told [the team], ‘if before the season, someone told you you’d be 19-10 halfway through the year, would you be upset?’ And they said, ‘we’d be pretty happy.’

“We had bad spell, but it’s not the end of the world. We’re a good team, we’ve just seen some bad luck and we’ll be fine, we just ran into some good pitchers.”

Madison is going to run into some more this weekend. Northeastern has pitched its way into second place. The Huskies have the third-lowest ERA in the league at 3.67 behind Virginia Commonwealth (3.23) and ODU (3.16) and are led by sophomore right-hander Kris Dabrowiecki, who is 3-0 in five starts with a 2.04 ERA. Joining him in the rotation are junior right-hander Dave Pellegrine and freshman right-hander Trevor Smith. Pellegrine is 3-2 with a 2.39 ERA and Smith, the reigning CAA Rookie of the Week after going 1-0 in 10.2 innings pitched with an 0.86 ERA, is 4-1 in nine appearances (three starts) with 1.01 ERA, while striking out 27 in 26.1 innings.

“[We know] absolutely nothing [about them],” McFarland said. “We’re trying to learn more, but apparently, they’ve got some pretty good pitchers, but that’s fine, we’ve got some good pitchers too.”

While the JMU pitching staff is fourth in the league with a 4.11 ERA, it is the Diamond Dukes’ offense that carried the team to nine straight conference wins. They are third in batting average, tops in slugging percentage and home runs, second in runs scored and RBIs and third in total bases. Madison even boasts the league’s second-leading hitter in sophomore center fielder Kellen Kulbacki, who was hitting .491 as of Monday and leads the conference in home runs with 15 (one in front of teammate, senior second baseman Michael Cowgill) and RBIs with 47. As a team, the Diamond Dukes have hit more homers than anyone, blasting 53 for the year thus far.

“We still haven’t hit all situations,” McFarland said. “We’re a fly ball team, a power team and I think that caught up with us a little bit this weekend [against ODU]. The wind was blowing in, but we’re hitting the ball pretty good. We have a lot of seniors who’ve been lifting weights for four years.”

JMU and Northeastern open the weekend series Friday at Parsons Field. First pitch is scheduled for 3 p.m.