Crusaders Cross Up Batsmen With 8-1 Victory

The slump continued, but the timing was a little better yesterday, as the Harvard baseball team traveled to scenic Worcester and dropped its third lopsided-margin game in a row with an 8-1 loss at the hands of Holy Cross.

Like a high fastball on a 0-2 count, this was a good one to waste. Holy Cross is the Crimson's only opponent that is neither a member of the Greater Boston League or Eastern League, thus a loss to the Crusaders is virtually no different than a win over Wisconsin-Oshkosh, as far as the batsmen's playoff aspirations are concerned.

Enough drivel. The Crimson, smoldering bats and all, got its lone run in the top of the ninth inning, when Burke St. John, Jim Peccerillo, and freshman catcher Chuck Marshall strung consecutive singles together, with St. John tallying to prevent the shutout.

St. John, despite a couple of errors in the field, went two for four on the day to lead Harvard batters. This was one of the few encouraging signs of the day, in that Burke had been struggling at the plate through the first half of the season and is counted on for key swat in the home stretch.

Jim Keyte got his long-awaited chance to smoke his fastball up North, but things kind of backfired on the freshman in his debut. Keyte went five innings and pitched to a few batters in the sixth before giving way to Ron Stewart. He was charged with seven of the Crusaders' eight runs, five of which were earned.

Stewart came in and promptly gave up the big shot of the day, a three-run homer to Rich Gasinski, before settling down to keep things in single digits for the next three innings. It was the sophomore's second long relief appearance in three days, and his outings may very well be good enough to earn him a start against Eastern League opponents Navy or Princeton this weekend.

Harvard-wise, the biggest story of the day was the house-cleaning job that Coach Loyal Park did on his starting line-up. After shifting captain Paul Halas from second base to his last-season haunt in left field and Mike Stenhouse from left to right, Park inserted sophomore Bobby Kelley at second, Dave Knoll at designated hitter, and Marshall behind the plate.

The jury is still out on the new lineup, though Marshall did have the only RBI and Kelley sent two outs about 370 feet to the base of the left center field wall.

As for Holy Cross, basketball transplant Ronnie Perry had a couple of hits and played well enough at shortstop to make up for his three-error performance last year at Harvard, from whence came the famous needle, "Hey, Perry, you don't have to dribble it before you throw!"

THE NOTEBOOK: Harvard faces defending GBL champion Brandeis today in Waltham, and it should be either Timmy Clifford (2-1) or Steve Baloff (3-1) getting the call.

My personal apologies for the dearth of information in today's story. The manager could not be reached when deadlines forced me to hand this to the typist.