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The Boston College Eagles baseball team might not have been in a position to win the 2013 Beanpot, but they did the next best thing: win the consolation game.

At Fenway Park on Tuesday afternoon, the Eagles defeated the Harvard Crimson, 7-2, to take third place in this year’s tournament. Boston College is in the midst of one of its best stretches of the season, now winning three of their last four games and improving their overall record to 9-35. Harvard drops to 10-31 with the loss.

The Eagles appeared to never be in danger of falling, taking a 1-0 lead from the outset in the top of the first inning and leading the entire way. Boston College, playing as the road team this time, totaled seven runs and nine hits; they also committed no errors, a major improvement from the six they had in their walk-off win over Miami on Sunday afternoon.

Freshman Joe Cronin led the way for the Eagles, knocking three hits and scoring a run. BC also got a multi-hit game out of junior John Hennessy, who went 2-for-5. Junior pitcher Steve Green took the victory for Boston College after five innings of one-run ball. Matt Timoney lost for Harvard.

The Eagles have just eight games remaining in their 2013 season. Next up for BC is a trip to Kingston, Rhode Island tomorrow to face the Rhode Island Rams.

The 2013 Baseball Beanpot gets underway at Fenway Park this afternoon. The first game of the doubleheader features the Boston College Eagles and the Harvard Crimson; in the second contest, the Northeastern Huskies will face the Massachusetts Minutemen. BC’s game is the consolation game, while Northeastern and UMass will play for the title.

Regardless of the fact that Boston College is not in the Beanpot championship game, this year’s tournament finals at Fenway will support a special BC cause. Net proceeds from the ticket sales on Monday will benefit the Pete Frates #3 Fund.

Frates, a former Boston College Eagles baseball player who graduated six years ago, has become one of the leading faces of the drive for ALS research since his diagnosis.

The Boston College half of the doubleheader begins at 2pm ET and tickets cost $10. Tickets may be purchased through the Boston Red Sox.

Apr 1, 2013; Minneapolis, MN, USA; A view of a baseball on the field during batting practice before a game between the Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins at Target Field. Mandatory Credit: Jesse Johnson-USA TODAY Sports

With the brisk winds coming in from the Res, Boston College Baseball finally started off its home schedule against the Harvard Crimson by beating the Ivy Leaguers for their fifth victory of the year 8-6 at Shea Field.

Boston College pitcher Matt Alvarez started the first three innings, letting in two runs, while picking up his first win of the season. Harvard’s starter Peter Kaplan dropped to 0-4 on the year giving up seven runs in two and a third.

Boston College’s offense was on early in the bottom of the first filling up the bases with no outs only for Kaplan to put on his Houdini cape and escape the jam with two swinging strikeouts and a simple pop out.

But Harvard was able to come back in the top of the third, when Alvarez was starting to lose some of his control of his pitches on the outside corner. He had two wild pitches and after a bit of hard, boring baseball the Crimson were able to push two across the plate.

Now, as has been the case throughout the Eagles’ rough and tumble year, this could have been the time where the Eagles laid down and died but Coach Gambino’s squad came alive in the bottom half.

Left fielder Jimmy Dowdell, who came in for Gabriel Hernandez, tripled down the left field line driving in two runs. Freshman shortstop Joe Cronin followed him with a double to deep center. The Eagles got two more runs in the inning pushing the lead to five runs, at 7-2.

Harvard started to come back throughout the game, really making it scary for the Superfans who braved the weather at Shea Field in the ninth after the Crimson’s Kregel hit a bomb over the fences in left cutting the Eagles lead to 8-6. Harvard then got two on, with two outs but Eagles pitcher Nick Poore was able to slam the door, forcing Wineski to fly out to Tom Bourdon in center field to end the affair.

It was a good victory for Boston College over their safety school Harvard. Perhaps maybe Harvard should work on their play on the field more than making YouTube videos(yes, they made that Call Me Maybe video that got over 17 million hits) as their record falls to 4 and 17. The Eagles move up to 5 and 22, with a game coming up on Friday at home against Clemson. See you there!!!

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Boston College hockey knows what time of year it is and are responding accordingly. On Monday evening in the second Beanpot semifinal at the TD Garden, the Eagles defeated the Harvard Crimson, 4-1.

The Eagles will face the Northeastern Huskies next Monday at 7:30pm in the title game of the 61st Beanpot Championship. Earlier on Monday, Northeastern claimed a 3-2 victory over the Boston University Terriers.

With the victory, BC improves to 16-7-2 on the season and has now won consecutive games for the first time since late November. Boston College has now also won eight consecutive games in the Beanpot dating back to the 2009 consolation game.

The Eagles did not have a shot on goal for approximately the first nine minutes of the game, though Harvard hardly generated much offensive pressure themselves during that stretch. Thereafter, Boston College completely dominated the contest. On their first power play, despite not having scored, BC managed six shots on goal and kept the puck in their offensive zone for nearly the entire advantage; from there, the Eagles were off to the races.

Sophomore Quinn Smith was first to get BC on the scoreboard with a very late goal in the opening period; his goal came at 19:31 and made the score 1-0 Eagles heading into the intermission (assists Wey, Dyroff). Boston College enjoyed scoring at the end of periods so much, they did it twice in the second period: Quinn Smith again at 18:18 (assists Arnold, MacLeod) and Mike Matheson seven seconds into a power play at 19:09 (assists Doherty, Mullane).

Harvard captain Danny Biega got the Crimson on the board at 9:17 of the third on a goal (assists Fick, Greiner), but BC got it back at 14:58 of the final frame with a terrific unassisted goal by Steven Whitney. That goal for Whitney was his 17th of the year, setting a new personal BC high-water mark.

Offensively, Harvard was no match for Boston College and that much became evident as the game progressed. Final shots on-goal were an astounding 46-20 in favor of the Eagles, which is even more impressive considering that they went almost half of the first period without any. On man-advantages, the Crimson were out of their depth. Harvard entered the Beanpot with disastrous power play and penalty kill percentages, which got worse against BC on Monday: the Crimson went 0-for-3 on the power play, and went just 1-for-2 on the kill. That does not tell the whole story, however: BC had numerous shorthanded chances on Harvard’s power play, while Harvard struggled to even keep the puck in the zone, and the Eagles looked very strong on their man-advantages.

This was a take-care-of-business win for the Eagles who are now legitimately starting to build some momentum for the first time in months. Before they can face Northeastern for a potential fourth-straight championship, Boston College will host Jerry York Night at Conte Forum on Friday against UMass-Lowell.

What would you say if I told you that Boston College hockey, the defending national champions and three-time defending Hockey East champions, had not won consecutive games since November?

No matter one’s reaction — probably profound despair on the part of Eagles fans — that statement is factually accurate.

The Eagles can break that spell and get back-to-back wins on Monday night at the TD Garden during a little tournament that Boston folk like to call the Beanpot. You may have heard of it. This time, their draw handed them a semifinal matchup with the Harvard Crimson. The two schools did not face each other in non-conference play this year away from this tournament.

Even though Boston College has not made the previous two months pretty in any way, shape, or form, their season has gone in a completely different direction from that of Harvard. For whatever faults they’ve had since blowing Jerry York’s 925th win in Providence, they’re still 15-7-2 and a serious threat to win the whole thing in April. The Crimson, on the other hand, have had a terrible season to date. Harvard is 5-14-1 and are presently on a seven-game losing streak. Their last victory was on January 9, ironically enough at Boston University, another Beanpot participant and hated Commonwealth Avenue rivals of BC. Now there’s a team with issues winning consecutive games.

In 20 games to this point, Harvard averages just over two goals per game and allows about three and a third. One standout statistic for the Crimson is their penalty kill, which stands at a poor 77.6% for the season. When they benefit from the man-advantage, they’ve scored just eight goals all season for a 10.1% conversion rate. Thing is, Harvard doesn’t take or go on an obscene number of penalties. Several days ago, BC played a Vermont team that rated last in Hockey East in the penalty kill and does go shorthanded often, and BC still did not net a power play goal. In games like this, if BC gets their chance, they’re going to have to take advantage of it, though it seems the Crimson give up plenty of even-strength goals as well.

The issue of Boston College’s consistency is still unresolved. It has not been uncommon in the last two months for BC to get a win and look good doing it, then fall to an inferior team and dredge up all the questions about what’s wrong with them. The scenario is then familiar, because Harvard is a far inferior team on paper, and BC did look good in wiping Vermont away on Friday. Winning this game is about more than the pride associated with advancing to the Beanpot finals with a chance to win their fourth title in a row: it’s about sustaining momentum. If Boston College can take care of business against Harvard and start becoming consistent, this could be the start of a very good month.

The puck will drop on NESN at approximately 8pm in the second of two semifinals. Jerry York will be inducted into the Beanpot Hall of Fame in between contests.

For the Boston College Eagles men’s basketball team, bad keeps getting worse when the Harvard Crimson are in town.

On Tuesday evening at Conte Forum, on a day that has already delivered attention to Boston College, the basketball team brought some particularly negative focus to themselves. The Harvard Crimson defeated the Eagles, 79-63. It is Harvard’s fifth-straight win over BC, and with the loss, the Eagles fall to 3-5 on the season.

In the first half, Boston College played to within two points, but the second half was incomprehensibly bad by the Eagles. It was what Eagle Action’s Eric Hoffses called “one of the worst halves [he’s] seen BC play in a long time,” including the 2011-12 debacle of a season, and few are in any position to disagree.

On offense, BC has been able to do a few things, and today the fans saw the re-emergence of Ryan Anderson after having been hampered by injury, but defensively was another story. The Eagles played a very bad game when Harvard had the ball, particularly in transition defense. They were also hopelessly incapable with regards to holding onto the ball, as Boston College turned the ball over four times in the first minute and a half of the second, setting a bad tone en route to 15 total for the game.

BC shot 58% from the floor and Harvard 55%, but Harvard took more shots, made more threes, and got to the free throw line a lot more often. It seemed that they could do whatever they wanted and BC was not going to be able to stop them. Dennis Clifford did not play, but let’s be honest: Clifford doesn’t win this team the game when they’re getting run out of their own gym. Perhaps he mitigates the damage, but losing by this much to a squad like Harvard is, and has been, a team effort.

There is no one fix for Boston College basketball, because so many things are going wrong. Steve Donahue is a good man, but at some point (as we learned in football), that isn’t enough. His team will have to start making some progress soon.

Boston College will try again on Saturday against St. Francis College (NY).

Greg M. Cooper-USA TODAY Sports

Once upon a time, games between the Boston College Eagles men’s basketball team and the Harvard Crimson were considered “cupcakes.” Through the mid-2000s, the Eagles had won 32 games against the team from Cambridge while Harvard had taken just nine of those meetings.

Then, with a player named Jeremy Lin and a coach named Tommy Amaker, that changed.

In 2009, shock filled Conte Forum as Boston College, ranked #24 in the country by virtue of just having beaten #1 North Carolina in Chapel Hill, got wasted by Harvard in one of the ugliest letdown games in recent BC sports history. Lin had 27 points that day, and the Eagles went on to make the NCAA Tournament that year, anyway. Virtually all Boston College fans, including this site three years ago, thought that the January 7, 2009 debacle was an aberration.

Then it happened again on December 9, 2009.

Then it happened again on January 5, 2011.

Then it happened again on December 29, 2011.

In the past four seasons, the personnel on the Crimson has changed, but the game outcomes have not. Harvard has built a four-game winning streak over the Eagles, and neither Al Skinner nor Steve Donahue were able to figure them out.

This Harvard team in 2012-13 is not as good as last year’s NCAA Tournament at-large bid squad; that team started the season 8-0, but this Crimson team is 3-3, having most recently lost a home game to Vermont and needing a comeback to beat Fordham. As for their opponents, the results have been decidedly mixed over the first seven games. Boston College has run the entire continuum from looking good (for 35 minutes) against Penn State and Baylor to godawful against Bryant for all 40. Nobody knows what they are as a team yet, not even themselves.

As a program, Harvard is definitely improved, though last year they seem to have reached their peak. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s still very possible for the Crimson to win this game on Tuesday night and send the Eagles to the degrading ignominy of defeat to an Ivy League school for the fifth-straight season. It’s also possible that the Eagles will finally snap this losing streak, but that all depends on which Boston College shows up. There is no exact science to it, so it’s one of those things we’ll have to see from game-to-game to understand.

Far more than just winning a non-conference game in December to try to get back to .500, Boston College needs this win to finally get the stain of all of these losses to Harvard off of their backs. Nobody writing for Soaring to Glory has a Ph.D. in psychology but one would think that at a certain point, a team they can’t beat gets in their heads. Even with a near-total roster turnover last season, the trend continued. This young Eagles team cannot let the Crimson live rent-free in between their ears.

Tip-off is expected at approximately 7pm.