PRINCETON, N.J. -- Penn was picked to earn its first Ivy League title since 1995 in the 2020 Ivy League Baseball Preseason Media Poll. The Quakers, who finished fourth in the Ivy League in 2019, topped the preseason poll with 119 points and 10-of-16 first-place votes.
Penn earned the nod over 2019 Ivy League champion Harvard, which finished second with 107 points and four first-place votes. The Crimson won their first Ivy League title since 2005 last season and swept Columbia in the Ivy League Playoff Series (ILPS) to earn the right to represent the Ivy League in the NCAA Tournament.
Over the past five seasons, the Ivy League has won five games in NCAA Baseball Regionals, with Columbia advancing to the regional final in Coral Gables in 2015 and Yale competing in the regional finale in Corvallis in 2017.
Should the preseason prediction hold, the 2020 Ivy League Playoff Series would be the first-ever postseason meeting of Penn and Harvard.
Columbia, which has won the Ivy League title, proven victorious in the ILPS and represented the League in the NCAA Tournament in four of the last seven campaigns, tallied 100 points and two first-place votes to sit third in the preseason ledger.
Yale, a year removed from back-to-back Ivy League championships, was picked to finish fourth in the League with 84 points.
Princeton has appeared in 12-of-27 ILPS, while Dartmouth (11), Harvard (9), Columbia (8), Yale (6), Penn (4), Cornell (3) and Brown (1) have also made appearances.
Columbia (6), Dartmouth (6) and Yale (3) have registered the most ILPS appearances over the past decade, with the Lions riding back-to-back appearances into the 2020 season.
Dartmouth (61 points) paced the bottom half of the poll, which also featured Brown (41 points), Princeton (38 points) and Cornell (26 points).
The 2020 campaign gets underway on Feb. 21 with 4-of-8 teams in action.
2020 IVY LEAGUE BASEBALL PRESEASON MEDIA POLL (First-Place Votes)
| Rank |
School |
Points |
| 1. |
Penn (10) |
119 |
| 2. |
Harvard (4) |
107 |
| 3. |
Columbia (2) |
100 |
| 4. |
Yale |
84 |
| 5. |
Dartmouth |
61 |
| 6. |
Brown |
41 |
| 7. |
Princeton |
38 |
| 8. |
Cornell |
26 |