Northeastern baseball is headed to the NCAA tournament by beating teams like a snare drum

USA Today

19-05-2025

Northeastern baseball is headed to the NCAA tournament by beating teams like a snare drum
The Northeastern Huskies began their 2025 baseball season on a 4-5 slump. That's not especially surprising. College baseball's February start date is especially unkind to northern teams. Their first four weeks featured zero home games and road trips to North Carolina, Florida, California and Hawai'i.
Once the Huskies got home, however, they began to beat New England's other teams like a snare drum.
Northeastern sits at 45-9 as the Coastal Athletic Association tournament looms. Three more wins could officially punch an NCAA Tournament after a 25-2 romp through conference competition. That would be nice, but it's a formality.
After a 24-game win streak, the Huskies sit at 19th in the D1Baseball.com poll. They're 25th in the RPI. Earning a regional hosting gig may be just out of reach, but even back-to-back losses this week would leave them no lower than a two seed in the 16 four-team pods that kick off each spring's 64-team road to the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska.
How unlikely is this? Enough that USA Today's photo library has 36 pages of Northeastern Huskies athletics and zero pictures of its baseball team. Northeastern is a hockey school first and foremost. It also gave us Jose Juan Barea, the undersized guard who played 14 seasons in the NBA and helped the Dallas Mavericks win their first world championship.
The diamond has produced few stars; 116 MLB draftees, 13 of which made it to the majors. The most successful was power-hitting first baseball Carlos Pena. Second place, in terms of career wins against replacement (WAR)? 30th-round reliever Adam Ottavino.
This is to say the Huskies are often a good team from the northeast. But they've never been this good.
Northeastern isn't merely beating teams en route to a program-record 45 wins. The club has left a trail of destruction in its wake. Monmouth got drubbed 34-10 in a three-game sweep. Hofstra went down by an aggregate of 19-1. Poor College of Charleston got packed up neatly and shipped back south without scoring a single run in Boston, losing by a total of 23-0.
Even Kansas State, 17-13 in Big 12 play this season, got in on the action. The Wildcats made a rare trip to the east coast for a midweek two-game series. They lost 11-4 and 5-3.
Northeastern isn't doing this with wild recruiting or gobs of NIL cash. Aside from freshman reliever Angel Cruz, who has made one appearance this spring, every player on the team is from either New York, New Jersey or New England. Four different players transferred up from Division III schools, including Jordan Gottesman, a left-handed starter who leads the team in strikeouts. Jack Goodman and Harrison Feinberg, two of the team's top batters, left the region to play on the west coast (Pepperdine and Southern California, respectively), transferred back home and are currently raking (24 home runs, 108 RBI between them).
This is all remarkable, but not entirely unexpected. Northeastern is headed to its fourth NCAA tournament in the last six years it's been held (excluding 2020 thanks to Covid-19). The 2021 team went 20-3 in CAA play. The 2023 squad went 44-14. Head coach Mike Glavine -- a NU alum and, yep, brother of Tom -- has built a sustainable regional powerhouse.
Northeastern is aiming for more. Those tournament invites resulted in zero wins, leaving the Huskies with little more than a participation trophy despite their place as a three-seed in each of those brackets. Four of their six NCAA Tournament losses have come by at least five runs.
2025 offers catharsis. Other Husky teams have been good. This one is at the threshold of greatness. 11 more wins in a row would give Northeastern the record for Division I baseball's longest winning streak. It would also rocket the program to a CAA tournament title, through the regional, past the Super Regional and into the College World Series final.
That's asking a lot for a team that's only played 11 games against quadrant 1 or 2 competition (and has seen five of its nine losses come against them). But Northeastern's entire 2025 has been about beating the odds... and beating the brakes off its opponents.