Jarrett Pokrovsky embodies Penn’s season-long battle to get back to playoff baseball

With four games remaining in Penn’s 2024 baseball season, Jarrett Pokrovsky suffered an injury that tore knee two ligaments along with his hamstring and meniscus, and resulted in a partial tear to his medial collateral ligament.

“It was a play that I’ve made 100 times in my career,” Pokrovsky said. “It was a fly ball over my left shoulder on my glove side. I was playing right field, and I jumped for the ball. The way I landed, I just happened to land in between where the grass and the warning track met. … My knee hyperextended and bent and twisted in all different sorts of ways.”

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The outfielder, who won the Ivy League tournament’s Most Outstanding Player award as a freshman the season before, watched the Quakers win the 2024 tournament from the stands.

Now a junior, Pokrovsky has an opportunity to return to the Ivy tournament. The Quakers, who finished the regular season 21-18 and 13-8 in Ivy play, earned the third seed in the four-team double-elimination bracket. Penn will face second-seeded Columbia in New Haven, Conn., on Friday (4 p.m., ESPN+).

“I’m so excited,” Pokrovsky said. “There’s no better feeling than playing with my best friends for something bigger than it is in the regular season.”

Top-seeded Yale and fourth-seeded Harvard will also compete for the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. The double-elimination Ivy tournament is scheduled to take place from Friday to Monday, although Monday’s game is only necessary if no team reaches three wins by the end of Sunday.

Pokrovsky went through a seven-month recovery process after getting injured in Penn’s April 28 matchup with Harvard last season. He was cleared for physical activity in November. John Yurkow, Penn’s baseball coach, said Pokrovsky’s push to get back in time for the 2025 season opener influenced the rest of the team.

“He’s a captain for us,” Yurkow said. “When you have a guy that has some adversity like that in his career, to come back and really thrive after going through that, I think everybody sees it.”

The outfielder hit a team-leading .346 and set the Penn record for doubles with 24 this season, which is also an Ivy League mark.

“It’s one thing to get back in time,” Yurkow said. “It’s another thing to have such an awesome season individually.”

Pokrovsky said that the injury and resulting time away from baseball allowed him to build up his confidence after he struggled with it last year.

“I didn’t have as much confidence as you probably should when you’re out there playing [last year],” Pokrovsky said. “So, I used that injury as kind of a mental reset. I think that mental reset helped me get back into things faster than I ever imagined.”

The added confidence paid off at the plate, as he finished the season with career highs in hits, doubles, and on-base percentage, and struck out just 26 times, a career low.

Penn was inconsistent throughout its 2025 regular-season schedule. The Quakers lost the first seven games of the year, but they also put together seven- and nine-game winning streaks in March and April.

Penn closed its season more cold than hot, with the Quakers going 3-6 in their final three league series. But the team earned a spot in the Ivy tournament, where it needs only three wins to secure a third consecutive NCAA Tournament berth.

“The way tournaments work, your previous weeks don’t mean a thing, Yurkow said. “... It’s really just getting hot at the right time.”

With the Quakers preparing to play as many as five games in four days, Yurkow stressed how important it is to get good innings out of his starters. Penn’s pitching depth has been thinned this season, as righty relievers Sebastian Haggard and John Cerwinski both suffered injuries in the team’s series with Dartmouth in March.

“If you’re limited on pitching, you have to be efficient,” Yurkow said. “If you lose, and you don’t have the pitching depth, you’ve got to get really creative on the mound, and it’s really tough to fight through.”

Noah Millikan will start for the Quakers against Columbia. The senior righty threw 4⅔ innings against the Lions in the regular season, allowing two runs on five hits in a 4-3 loss.

“I feel pretty good if he can go out and give us a good start,” Yurkow said. “We should be in pretty good shape.”

For Pokrovsky, the key to success in a tournament setting is confidence.

“Our pitchers need the confidence to go in there and know they can throw strikes and get anybody out,” he said. “The hitters need to go in there knowing they can compete with anybody in the box.”

Even after a rough finish to the regular season, the Quakers have plenty of reasons to be confident. Penn is the only team to win the Ivy tournament after the league switched over from a championship series to its current four-team format in 2023. That postseason experience feeds the Quakers’ confidence.

“We’ve been on both sides,” Pokrovsky said. “We’ve won the tournament in three, and we’ve also [gone] through the losers’ bracket. Whatever happens, we know what to expect.”

If the Quakers can beat out Yale, Columbia, and Harvard, Penn will make its seventh overall appearance in the NCAA Tournament. The Quakers have made three straight NCAA tournaments once before, with berths in 1988, 1989, and 1990.

Penn is two seasons removed from its 6-3, extra-innings upset of 13th-seeded Auburn in the 2023 regional tournament. It was the Quakers’ first win in an NCAA regional since a 5-3 victory over UC Santa Barbara in 1990. In its 2024 tournament appearance, Penn lost both games it played.

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To return to the NCAA Tournament, the Quakers are approaching their Ivy tourney games in three-inning chunks.

“You win the first three innings, and then keep competing and see where we are in the middle innings, and then try to find a way to win the game in the last three,” Pokrovsky said. “You can’t win the Ivy tournament in Game 1, and you can’t make the regional in Game 1.”