Penn baseball readies for the bright lights and ‘big crowds’ of NCAA regional play

Penn baseball has been waiting 28 years for its chance to play in the NCAA Tournament. And now that the Quakers have done it, it’s not just them that’s excited.

“It’s funny and cool to see everyone on campus rally around us,” third baseman Wyatt Henseler said. “Even the other day, there was a FedEx driver that recognized some of us and pulled us aside and congratulated us. You know, he was super pumped for us and wished us luck. So it’s been cool to see the Penn community come behind us and rally some support for us.”

Henseler, a junior from Emmaus, Pa., hit .500 with four RBIs in the Ivy League tournament last week to help the Quakers win an automatic bid to the NCAA regional. Even with at-bats limited by a COVID-19-shortened freshman season, Henseler already holds the Penn record for career home runs with 31.

» READ MORE: What’s propelled No. 1 Penn baseball to the top of nearly every Ivy League stat? Pitching.

Penn is the No. 4 seed in the Auburn Regional and will match up first against the top-seeded hosts on Friday night (7 p.m., ESPN+). The winner of the Penn-Auburn game will face the winner of Friday’s opener between No. 2 seed Southern Miss and No. 3 seed Samford (2 p.m., ESPN+) on Saturday. The losers of Friday’s games will play in an elimination game on Saturday at 2 p.m.

Weirdly enough, the last time the Quakers played in an NCAA regional, their first opponent was also Auburn. In 1995, Penn lost 2-1 to the Tigers, then ranked ninth nationally by Baseball America.

Members of the 1995 Penn team met with current players via Zoom on Tuesday to share some words of wisdom.

“It’s definitely ironic that we’re going up against the same team that the last regional team made it to, so it was kind of ironic and funny to talk about a little bit where they were then, and also hear about the experience that they had,” Henseler said.

No. 13 Auburn has far more NCAA Tournament experience than Penn, hosting a regional for the second consecutive season after making the College World Series last year. But the Quakers aren’t coming in completely blind. Penn opened its season at No. 15 South Carolina, and though they lost all three games to the Gamecocks, two of those were by a margin of one run.

Last year, Penn won its season-opening series against Texas A&M, another SEC foe that went on to make the semifinals of the 2022 CWS.

“That’s exactly the reason why I did it — to get our kids in that kind of atmosphere, where there’s going to be a big crowd, getting used to it, knowing that that’s what it would be like when we went to a regional,” Penn coach John Yurkow said. “So I’m really hoping that that pays dividends here this weekend.”

Henseler is one of six captains on Penn’s roster, part of Penn’s returning corps that narrowly missed out on an NCAA regional last year. After sharing the 2022 regular season Ivy title with Columbia, Penn lost a best-of-three series to the Lions on home turf, and Columbia took the automatic bid. That experience stung, but it motivated Penn to win all four of its games against Columbia this year.

Though Henseler finished second in the conference in home runs (17), RBIs (60), and slugging percentage (.633), and third in the conference in OPS (1.048), he had a self-described “tough” start to his junior season.

“That happens in every season, there’s gonna be some slumps,” Henseler said. “A lot of in-season adjustments helped a lot to get me back on track, and I’m happy I’m clicking now towards the end when it really matters.”

The unanimous first-team All-Ivy selection already owns Penn’s single-season records for hits (72), runs (57), home runs (17), and total bases (131). But it was a blast against Cornell on April 28, the 27th of his Penn career, that reset the career home run record that had stood since 1979.

“I get texts all the time like, ‘Man, is this Wyatt kid legit or what?’” Yurkow said. “William Gordon, who was up there with a bunch of our career records, reached out to me. He’s like, ‘Hey, what about this Hensler kid, huh?’ And he came to our series last weekend, he got to watch him. He’s like, ‘Okay, I can see it now.’”

Penn has the chance to make some more history as a team this weekend. And while this is 28 years in the making, at the end of the day, it’s still just another weekend on the diamond.

“Coming from a smaller baseball school, I think you always hear the hype around this school, this player, this and that,” Henseler said. “And then you get up there, and you realize that they’re just another guy, strapping up the cleats and throwing the baseball around. It’s the same game.”

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