CLAREMONT, Calif. - The Claremont-Mudd-Scripps baseball team earned an at-large bid to the NCAA Division III Tournament and will travel to a regional hosted by Tufts University, where it will open against Kean (N.J.) on Friday. 

Tufts and Mitchell will meet in the other opening round game on Friday. The two winners will meet on Saturday, while the two opening-round losers will meet in an elimination game. The regional finals will be held on Sunday, for the right to advance to Super Regionals. 

CMS is making its third straight appearance, after earning its first bid since 1996 during the 2024 campaign, when it won two games at East Texas Baptist to advance to the regional finals. A year ago, the Stags won the first regional in program history in Wisconsin-La Crosse, and advanced to the Super Regionals at Endicott. 

CMS won its first SCIAC regular season title this year since 1990 with a three-game sweep of Cal Lutheran on the final weekend, and Alex Henderson was named the SCIAC Player of the Year.

Henderson has proven to be a postseason monster in his Stags career, hitting a whopping 11 home runs in seven NCAA Tournament games last year. He two three-homer games at the NCAA Regionals at Wisconsin-La Crosse, finishing with nine homers in five games, and then finished with a two-homer game at Endicott.

This year, Henderson hit five home runs in four games in the SCIAC Tournament last week, ending with a pair two-homer games on the final day, and now has 18 this yeasr – which is two shy of the CMS record for a season, set by Andrew Mazzone two years ago. As a team, CMS ranks No. 1 in the nation in home runs with 92. 

The Stags also stand four wins away from keeping an interesting note alive. Head Coach Bill Walkenbach is in his ninth full season, and CMS has improved its win total from the year before in each of the first eight, going from 11 wins in his first year to 35 last year. The Stags enter NCAA play with 31 on the season.