Carter Leads Baseball Into Battle

At the start of the season, Harvard baseball coach Joe Walsh said that he thought his team was as good as any in the Ivy League.

But he also stressed that there was one factor that could potentially put the Crimson (9-17, 4-4 Ivy) over the top.

"For Nick Carter to step up and have a big year for us would be a big boost," Walsh said. "If Carter could put up some numbers, that'd be scary."

Maybe it was a vote of confidence or maybe it was a challenge. Either way, Harvard's junior third baseman has responded in a big way. After advertising all the tools of a premier slugger in his first two seasons, Carter has put everything together in his junior year and is enjoying quite the breakout season.

In the hit parade that was Harvard's 9-8 win over Holy Cross on Wednesday, Carter was the grand marshal. The box score said it all-three hits, two runs scored, two RBI, and his team-leading sixth homer of the season to boot.

For any other player in the Ivy League, that kind of performance would have constituted a banner day. But for Carter, it was just another Wednesday.

In what has so far been an up-and-down season for most of Harvard's hitters, Carter has been one of the team's most potent men at the plate, as well as its most consistent. One of only two Harvard players to play in all 26 of the team's games, Carter boasts a .378 average along with team-best totals in runs (21), home runs (6), and RBI (19). Statistics may not always tell the whole story, but in this case, they definitely illustrate the renaissance that Carter has undergone at the plate this season.

In the past, Carter was strikeout-prone. Last year, for instance, he had more strikeouts than hits, fanning once every four trips to the plate.

But this year, he doesn't just go up hacking anymore-and it shows. So far this season, he has almost three hits for every whiff. He has also fanned just once every 7.8 plate appearances, a remarkable ratio. But the most telling statistic-disciples of Peter Gammons will appreciate this-might be his robust .1073 OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage). In layman's terms, that basically means Carter is always either on base or driving in the people who are.

"He must be seeing grapefruits when he's up there, because he's just hitting the shit out of the ball," co-captain Scott Hopps said.

Carter's emergence comes as no surprise to his teammates who have seen him pound the ball in the offseason. A California native, Carter is used to playing year-round, and he perennially is one of the Crimson's best preseason performers.

"It's been sort of the running joke on the team that he's the best fall player on the team," Hopps said. "This winter, when we were hitting in the gym, he was hitting the crap out of the ball. He just kept saying, 'I hope I can actually do it when the season starts'."

So far, Carter has. And as Harvard kicks off Red Rolfe Division play this weekend with a four-game set against Yale, the Crimson offense appears primed to finally start taking advantage of the team's excellent pitching staff, which entered Wednesday's contest with an impressive 3.69 ERA. Harvard's offensive resurgence is largely thanks to Carter, whose looming presence in the Crimson order forces opposing pitchers to go after the rest of the lineup. It's no wonder, then, that the rest of the team's hitters are starting to come around (see catcher Brian Lentz, 4-for-5 with a homer against the Crusaders).

After all, as Wednesday proved, all it takes is a spark from one player to ignite a fire.

"Hitting is contagious," Hopps said. "[Assistant] Coach [Matt} Hyde says it all the time. I don't know if it's how the pitcher reacts after somebody gets a hit, or if the hitter themselves just react. But it definitely carries over."

Harvard's 14 hits against the Crusaders on Wednesday was a season-high. More importantly, though, Harvard bounced back even when one Holy Cross homer after another appeared to put the game away.

"The wind was blowing out and Holy Cross was hitting a bunch of homers, but we just kept coming back at them," Hopps said.

Yale (7-14, 2-6) arrives in Cambridge today occupying the cellar of the Red Rolfe Division. Harvard, meanwhile, is tied for second place with Dartmouth. Sitting one game in back of first-place Dartmouth, this weekend provides Harvard with a prime opportunity to move up in the pecking order of the division.

After taking just one of its two games against its first four Ivy opponents, the Crimson would like nothing more than a sweep of the Elis.

"We need to stop splitting," Hopps said. "We have to take at least three out of four. If we don't start sweeping teams, we'll lose ground."

That should not be a worry with a certain third baseman powering the Crimson order. Fittingly, it was Carter's homer that started off Harvard's comeback rally on Wednesday. As the Crimson now gears up for the most important part of its season this weekend, Carter may well have jumpstarted the Harvard offense at exactly the right time.