With the college baseball conference tournament season
starting, this is the second in a series on local teams and their
conferences. Today: Fordham and the Atlantic 10. Tomorrow: Manhattan
and the MAAC.
Growing up in Danbury, Conn., Bobby DiNardo followed college baseball,
including the NCAA Tournament and the College World Series.
He was not, however, all that familiar with Fordham’s baseball team.
“I didn’t know anything about it,” DiNardo said. “All I had heard
about was football and Vince Lombardi.”
But the baseball program has quite a bit of history of its own, from
former players Frankie Frisch and Vin Scully to coaches such as Gil
McDougald and Paul Blair.
This season, the Rams celebrated 150 years of baseball, having played
every season since 1859 — except for 1944, which was cancelled because
of World War II. They have the most wins, 4,022, in NCAA history.
Now DiNardo and his teammates hope to make their mark by getting the
Bronx school to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1998.
“That’s what we came here for,” said DiNardo, a senior who leads the
team with 15 homers and 47 RBIs. “There would be no better way to go
out.”
He said this as the team bused to Dayton, Ohio, where the fifth-seeded
Rams will face No. 4 UMass today in the first round of the of the
Atlantic 10 tournament. And despite their 22-30 overall record, they
are confident. The Rams went 16-11 in the conference and won six of
their last seven games to end the regular season.
It’s quite a turnaround from early in the year, when Fordham dropped
nine of its first 10.
“We definitely didn’t want to do badly this season, especially since
the spotlight was on us because of the anniversary,” DiNardo said.
“But we bounced back from a lot of adversity and I think it made us
stronger.”
His coach agreed.
“I think when we went through tough times earlier, the players took
pride in saying, ‘Not this year,’ñ” said Nick Restaino, a 1993 Fordham
graduate who is in his fifth year as head coach. “That’s what makes
the way we finished up even more rewarding.”
Of course, they’d like to win a few more.
“We’ve basically been playing playoff games for the past three weeks
just to get into the Atlantic 10 Tournament,” Restaino said. “So
there’s not going to be any more pressure on us now.”
