Our first look at some Ivy League baseball this year came on Easter Sunday, with a quick visit to Princeton’s Clarke Field for a classic Princeton-Yale matchup set for the afternoon. The Bulldogs walked away with a 5-2 win, and had several players pop onto the radar with their respective performances.
Davis Hanson has likely been one of Yale’s best bats thus far this season, and that certainly continued on Sunday. The big sophomore impressed with an early double and long home run, and has been a bit of an on-base machine for the Bulldogs, having hit in eight straight games. Hanson was the team’s regular first baseman last year, but has shifted mostly to third this year…he’s likely best suited at the former, and would fit the profile well at 6-foot-3 and 200 pounds. K rate is workable given the profile, but evaluators will likely want to see him draw some more walks as he progresses as well. Potential for a pro future is there, but if he’s ultimately limited to just first base — he made one error at third on Sunday, and could been credited with another on a hard hit ball later in the same inning — then that will obviously limit his opportunities. Average runner with a 4.3 hustling out of the box out of the right side.
Colton Shaw came to Yale as a two-way player, but his performance at the plate last year ultimately dictated the shift to focusing mostly full-time on pitching. A six-foot-two, 200-pound junior righty, there’s a lot to like with the overall package here, but it’s hard to not wish there wasn’t just a little more in the tank from a velo standpoint; he consistently sat 88-90 on Sunday from a three-quarter arm slot. Holds runners well; quick, effective pickoff move.
Shaw earns his marks for his competitiveness and gets the results to match — he finished in Ivy play in 2023 among the top-10 in wins, strikeouts, ERA, innings pitched and complete games — and turned in a strong, old-school outing on Sunday in which he went seven frames and struck out seven, allowing just two runs on five hits. Both runs came on solo homers later in his outing, but were the only two major mistakes he made. Would be the kind of kid who, from a mentality standpoint, would serve a team well as a back-end-of-the-rotation innings-eater-type, but may not get the look based on what the radar gun says. Could really do a lot for his stock in a senior year in 2025 with some gains.
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