For 150 years, the Penn baseball team has produced titles, pro ballplayers, and a supportive alumni base.
Over the last few years, John Yurkow has shepherded Penn baseball through one of its most successful runs in program history.
But hanging next to the recent Ivy League championship trophies, rings, and Coach of the Year plaque decorating Yurkow’s office are older pieces of memorabilia that long predate the head coach’s tenure. These include a photo of the 1889 team and a framed wool jersey worn eight decades ago by Robert Partridge Ed’41 GEd’47, the father of Penn Baseball Hall of Famer Glenn Partridge C’76.
For Yurkow, those connections to history serve as an important reminder of his role as a “placeholder” leading a program that this year marked its 150th anniversary.
“Obviously 150 years is a long time,” says Yurkow, who became Penn’s head coach in 2013 after serving seven years as an assistant, “and it’s pretty cool to be a part of it.”
According to Penn Archives, baseball was one of the earliest sports established at the University, behind only cricket and rowing. Though baseball games were believed to have been played in the 1860s, Penn’s first documented season, organized entirely by students, occurred in 1875 with the team recording a 5–3 record.
“By the turn of the century,” per Penn Archives, “collegiate baseball looked much more like baseball as we know it,” with the University offering financial support for a coach, uniforms, and facilities. That 1900 season also produced short game recaps in the New York Times, including this one about an 11–2 win over Brown on May 17: “Brown disappointed the expectation of the baseball enthusiasts who braved the sun’s rays to go to Franklin Field this afternoon by falling an easy victim to the Pennsylvania nine.” (Yes, baseball games used to be played at Franklin Field—for 44 years, in fact—before moving to other venues, and eventually to Meikeljohn Stadium, which opened 25 years ago near I-76 and University Avenue.)
From the beginning, many Penn baseball alums graduated to the professional ranks, including Billy Goeckel C1895 L1896, a founding member of the Penn Band who composed “The Red and Blue” [“Gazetteer,” Jul|Aug 2024], and Roy Thomas W1894, who played most of his 13 sterling seasons in Major League Baseball with the Philadelphia Phillies. Thomas returned to his alma mater to coach the Quakers for many years but is perhaps best known for fouling off so many pitches that an MLB rule was changed to make fouls before the third strike count as strikes [“Profiles,” May|Jun 2005]. (Remarkably, the same era of Penn baseball also produced the prolific Western novelist Pearl Zane Grey D1896 Hon1917 [“Dentist of the Purple Sage,” Mar|Apr 2004].)
The winning run of the 1912 World Series was scored by Boston Red Sox infielder Steve Yerkes W1909, who earlier that year recorded five hits in the first game ever played at Fenway Park. He remained the only Quaker to play in a World Series until pitcher Jake Cousins C’17 did it last year for the New York Yankees—which Yurkow was keenly watching.
On the other side of Yurkow’s office from his historic memorabilia is a photo of Cousins along with about a dozen other Penn alums who have been drafted in recent years, some of whom are still climbing the minor league ranks. As one of four Quakers selected in the 2017 Major League Baseball Draft (in what Yurkow called a “historic day” at the time), Cousins broke into the majors in 2021 and became the first Penn alum to pitch in an MLB game since Steve Adkins EAS’86 did it in 1990. Yurkow believes other Quakers have a shot to join Cousins there and says he makes it a point to recruit players who believe such a dream is possible because “those kids wind up winning a lot of games here.”
Although more than 50 Penn alums in total have played in the majors, fewer have made the leap since 1950. Grover Powell W’66 [“Profiles,” Nov|Dec 2015] and Adkins both had brief pitching stints with the New York Mets and Yankees, respectively, before Doug Glanville EAS’93 and Mark DeRosa W’97 enjoyed long and successful pro careers.
Both Glanville and DeRosa jumped on the bandwagon two years ago when the Quakers rekindled some of the magic from their eras with an Ivy League championship and a couple of wins at the NCAA regionals [“Sports,” Jul|Aug 2023]. Members of Penn’s 1995 Ivy championship team—which this year celebrated an anniversary, along with Penn’s title-winning teams from 1990 and 1975—did a Zoom with the 2023 team to offer advice. DeRosa, as his teammate Michael Green W’95 recalled, stole the show on that call—just as he did during their playing days. “DeRosa was a character, man,” Green says. “He was so funny.”
One of Green’s favorite Penn memories was joining DeRosa and his other teammates at Smokey Joe’s to hear the team’s named called when the 1995 NCAA bracket was announced. Other memories include watching Bull Durham and Major League on bus rides; making a trip to his native Los Angeles, which included a tour of Dodger Stadium thanks to teammate Kevin O’Malley C’97 WG’04, the son of then-Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley W’60; and early-season barnstorming tours through Florida. Unlike today, when the players stay in hotels, the team used to bunk up at the homes of Florida-based alums. Sleeping on the couch, “my feet were sticking two feet off,” Green recalls. “That’s just the way it was.”
Bill Potter C’79 had similar recollections, praising “generous alumni” for tolerating the behavior of players prone to staying out late and partying in the Sunshine State. Potter also lauded Bob Seddon, who was “very diplomatic and friendly” with the alums while serving as head coach of the program from 1972 to 2005 (also coaching soccer for much of that stretch).
These days, both Potter and Green are part of the Penn baseball board, helping to raise money for a program that relies on significant alumni contributions to support road trips and other costs, including recent stadium renovations [“Sports,” Sep|Oct 2020]. They also offer career mentorship for current players, plan alumni events to build camaraderie, and sometimes even suit up and retake the field for exhibition games. Green, whose .430 batting average in 1993 ranks sixth in program history, often takes batting practice with the team when he’s back on campus—where he can usually only foul the ball off.
Both Potter and Green have noticed how much bigger, better, and stronger the Penn players are than the ones from their eras. “Penn really cranks out minor leaguers now left and right,” Potter says. “It’s a great program for somebody that wants to be a professional baseball player.” Green adds that the influx of players drafted not only from Penn but across the Ivies “shows how much more elevated the league has gotten,” he says. “I joke to people that I wouldn’t even make the team now.”
But Green is glad to remain connected to the program and to Yurkow, who he says is excellent at making the game fun for his players—the same way Green had fun 30 years ago. “For me, it’s just about remembering how special the time was and how lucky I was to play Division 1 baseball at Penn with all of its history,” Green says.
Yurkow credits the program’s alumni community with bolstering a program that’s emerged as a dominant force in the Ivies over the last four years—with a pair of regular-season titles, Ivy League Tournament championships, and NCAA tournament berths. (Penn once again qualified for the four-team Ivy tourney this year but didn’t win it.)
Hearing alums talk about their playing days, “I can’t help but think that hopefully the guys that I’m coaching now, when they come back 20 years from now, they’ll be able to do the same thing,” Yurkow says. “It’s something they really cherish, and it continues to always bring them back and keep them together.”
—DZ
