YU makes baseball history in Teaneck
What happens when a yielding object meets a totally resistible force?
That’s the metaphysical question underlying the fascination with the baseball doubleheader held in Teaneck on Tuesday, which pitted the two losingest teams in collegiate baseball in a match that promised to break a multiyear losing streak — and in fact broke two.
Lehman College hadn’t won a baseball game since 2023; it’s lost 42 games in a row. But that was nothing compared with the Yeshiva University Maccabees (not to be confused with the school’s more successful basketball team of the same name), which entered the matchup having logged 99 straight losses. It last won in February 2022.
Word of the pending match spread on social media. MLB.com sent reporter Michael Clair to cover the game. He spoke to some of the people he found there. They included James Logan Hatch, who explained why he spent the afternoon watching the worst teams in college baseball play: “Just being a fan of the game, you can’t miss something like this.”
NBC News spoke to an NCAA official, who could not provide records for the most combined losses by two teams meeting in any one contest, but did come up with a quote before the match: “Wow, those are big numbers.”
But Yeshiva’s losing streak fell well short of the record of the Caltech Beavers, who lost 228 consecutive games from 2003 to 2013.
The first game of the doubleheader — played at Fairleigh Dickinson University, because Lehman College worried that its field was soaked from the week’s heavy rains — was a nail-biter, going into extra innings, and ending with Lehman’s 7-6 victory.
But, perhaps heartened by the local yeshiva high school students who flocked to the match after school let out, Yeshiva rallied to a 9-4 victory.
A mighty losing streak had struck out.
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