Dan-nie Baseball: One Last Time Around the Park

Remember Bart Brush? I didn't think so.

Brush was the most colorful figure on the 1997 Harvard baseball team, a squad with more hues than a jumbo box of Crayolas. He wore thick glasses and robust muttonchop sideburns and strolled around the right-field bullpen with his uniform shirt untucked and his pitching hand down his pants.

Brush was a senior relief pitcher, a holdover from the days of part-time Coach Leigh Hogan, when the Crimson practiced when it felt like it and went three years without a winning record, going as low as 10-25 in 1995.

Of course, things changed under the renaissance of present Coach Joe Walsh, who has led the Crimson to four Red Rolfe Division titles, three Ivy League championships and four NCAA Tournament wins in five seasons. But in 1997, when it had been 13 years since Harvard had tasted postseason play, Brush was a bridge to the past and quaintly anachronistic. It looked like he could have wandered up North Harvard Street to O'Donnell Field from the Sports Depot in Allston and, stumbling upon a baseball game, decided he wouldn't mind tossing the horsehide around a little.

Even a wild card like Bart Brush had his role on Walsh's Crimson.

When I interviewed Walsh for the first time, on the eve of Opening Day of the 1998 season, I asked how he could replace the team's two graduates--cleanup-hitting Pete Albers and Ivy Pitcher of the Year Frank Hogan. Walsh interrupted to correct me, told me there had been three seniors on the 1997 team, and made his apologia for Brush: "He might have looked like who-knows-what, but he came to play every day."

At the time, I bracketed Walsh's enthusiasm, writing it off as another in the litany of stock responses that reporters get by the dozen: "We played our game today," "We were able to execute," "We had a lot of positive team energy," or the chestnut so moldy it was banned from the Crimson sports page--"It was a real hard-fought win." As Red Sox manager Jimy Williams is fond of saying about his favorites, "Trot Nixon, he's a real baseball player." And so on ad nauseam.

But with the patience and diligence of a deconstructive critic, I came to read more into Walsh's words. As I watched his Crimson blitz through a 34-16 season in 1998, one which ended at the NCAA Tournament in Baton Rouge, La., with Harvard ranked No. 24 in the nation and just three wins away from the College World Series, I realized that Walsh was anachronistic in his own right.

Bucking the prevailing trend of what's derisively called "gorilla baseball" in the college game and "the NL Central" in the pros--relying on juiced-up batters drilling juiced-up balls for double-digit run totals--Walsh's Crimson played baseball so throwback that watching it, you felt like it should have been in black-and-white.

The ideal Harvard rally featured two bunt singles, a double steal, a Texas-Leaguer and a suicide squeeze. The Crimson is still the only team I've ever seen that lines up outside its dugout to congratulate somebody who moved a runner from second to third with a 4-3 groundout. Sophomore catcher and All-Ivy First-Teamer Brian Lentz went 9-for-16 on the first weekend of league play this year, and Walsh told me he was happiest that Lentz slid hard into second to break up a double play when down nine runs in the ninth.

It worked, and brilliantly. Walsh and a cast of versatile, professional ballplayers like Dave Forst '98 and Brian Ralph '98, four-year starters Hal Carey '99 and Peter Woodfork '99 and tri-captains Erik Binkowski, Jeff Bridich and Jason Larocque resuscitated a bush-league program and made it the unabashed terror of New England baseball.

But true to Walsh's attention to detail, there were role players who were often equally significant. The most improbable hit in O'Donnell Field's history came when rookie infielder Faiz Shakir slapped a two-out, two-run single in the top of the ninth in the deciding third game of the 1999 Ivy League Championship Series to give Harvard a 3-2 lead and the title. Shakir had 11 career hits, 10 of them singles, at that point in the year.

Throwing what some Yale starters laughed off as a "BP fastball," sidearmer Mike Marcucci '98 went 7-0 in relief and could never have cracked 80 on the radar gun. Being on such a single-minded and intelligent team made everybody better and produced some of the most thrilling moments in the last four years of Harvard athletics. I salute the 1997-2000 Crimson. Real baseball players, all of them.

Remember Bill Ewing '99? You ought to.

Ewing was a 6'9 senior center on the 1998-99 Harvard basketball team, and he played the most memorable role in the most memorable win that Harvard men's basketball managed in our four years--an 87-79 decision over the three-time defending Ivy champion Princeton Tigers on Senior Night at Lavietes Pavilion.

For three years, Ewing had been something of an enigma. His gangly body seemed to have been stretched out from 6'0 to fill out his implausible height, and his roommate once told me "Bill eats everything. He just can't put on any weight."

He once suffered the freakiest of injuries, getting his knee shattered by a brick thrown from an overpass through the windshield of his car onto a highway where he was driving with his family.

He was the dominant center on a New York State high school championship team, and in the final game of his high school career, he triple-doubled 1999-2000 NBA co-Rookie of the Year Elton Brand. Recruited as a key frontcourt contributor and handed the starting job at the beginning of his junior year, Ewing rapidly lost minutes to Paul Fisher '99 and faded far down Coach Frank Sullivan's bench.

Ewing was good for at least one acrobatic rejection a game, a solid playground stuff that makes everybody cringe--but he couldn't defend shorter, bulkier post players and his offense seemed theoretical at best.

The end of Ewing's Harvard career turned out to be a pure Hollywood script. When Fisher went down with mononucleosis halfway through the season, Ewing stepped into the starting five and played like--well, like Elton Brand. During one four-game stretch, he posted three double-doubles, including both games of the Penn-Princeton homestand as he matched up against the Quakers' Geoff Owens and the Tigers' Chris Young.

Against Princeton, Ewing was heroic. Hit with his fourth foul with 9:26 to play, Ewing nimbly and carefully frustrated the Tigers' big men like a kid playing precariously in an attic full of breakables. He helped hold Young and forward Mason Rocca to just three field goals in the last 10 minutes of regulation. But with 2:57 remaining in regulation and the Crimson clinging to a one-point lead, Ewing caught Rocca on the arm as the latter went up for a put-back, and Ewing was done with five fouls.

At first, he showed mock disbelief, his hand caught in the cookie jar. Then his face turned purple and he looked ready to weep, and had to be escorted from the floor by the refs, whereupon he buried his face in a towel and refused to watch.

After a trio of three-point buckets by Mike Beam '99 and an impossible 25-footer by junior Dan Clemente helped the Crimson pull away in overtime, Ewing was glowing in the interview room. His suit at least two sizes too small, he blabbed unstoppably, talking about his own battles with injury and poor production. He told the Elton Brand story gleefully, wrapping it up with the afterthought "You guys probably know all about what Elton Brand has accomplished."

He stole the show as Tim Hill '99 and Beam looked on with amusement. Veteran scorers and game-makers, they were as well-schooled in the press conference drill as they were in the full-court press: speak quickly and move it along. Ewing was new to the game and wanted to make it last. Only some prodding by Sports Information Director John Veneziano finally induced him to hit the bricks.

Ewing was a forgotten contributor to a Class of 1999 that put Harvard basketball on the map, winning a record 58 games during its four-year career. Hill, the flashy and deft point guard who played a year of pro ball in the Netherlands, and Beam, the reticent shooter with deadly aim, regularly eclipsed him. Even rookies Drew Gellert and Pat Harvey, whose quick hands and nose for the basket were scintillating to watch, got more press. But I'll remember Ewing's role in the Princeton upset most.

Like Brush, it just makes for the best story.