It all started innocently enough. As omens go, Penn shortstop Steve Glass’ bunt single that led off the top of the seventh inning on Saturday wasn’t all that menacing.

But when the very next hitter, Jim Mullen, homered to left, the Harvard baseball team’s 10-4 lead was cut by two. Then, on the very next pitch from Crimson reliever Kenon Ronz, Penn’s All-Ivy second baseman Nick Italiano jacked a shot over the right field fence.

Harvard changed pitchers after that, bringing in senior Mike Dryden. The switch didn’t help much—Penn first baseman Andrew McCreery greeted Dryden with another dinger.

All of a sudden, the Quakers had back-to-back-to-back home runs.

Five batters later, the game was tied. Two innings after that, it was over. Penn scored eight runs in the top of the ninth to put the game out of reach.

The Crimson bullpen had not a been cause for concern before this weekend, but after Saturday, it might be.

“As a coaching staff, we’re a little worried because there have been times when we had the pitching, but didn’t have the hitting. Then we get a little bit of hitting and the pitching goes south,” Harvard Coach Joe Walsh said.

The Crimson relievers weren’t helped by the gale-force winds that were blowing out to right field. But Walsh was not inclined to blame the elements for the late-game meltdown.

“We had a 10-4 lead going into the last inning—you win those games.” Walsh said. “Even though the wind was blowing out, every one of those balls—other than the one hit off Dryden—was crushed.”

Senior Mark Mager—who went 4-for-5 in the game—tipped his cap to the Penn hitters for not giving up on Saturday.

“They did a good job hitting in the clutch,” he said. “When you get six runs, that’s pretty clutch. It’s hard to fault our relievers for one inning.”

The bullpen bounced back against Columbia yesterday. Junior Matt Self tossed four innings of two-hit ball in relief of Madhu Saty in game one, while Trey Hendricks closed out the final 2.2 innings for Chaney Sheffield in the second game.

But even if the bullpen as a whole returns to form relatively quickly, Saturday’s debacle did little to help the cause of two former Harvard starters who were bidding to return to the rotation.

Ronz, who is coming off his second summer in the Cape Cod League, was a weekend starter during his first two seasons with the Crimson. But he began struggling at the tail end of last season and—counting his outing on Saturday, when he failed to retire a batter—he has just three appearances this year.

His innings have been limited by bicep tendinitis, an injury that Walsh says has slowed his fastball.