Baseball Falls From Glory

Moments after his team closed out its Ivy League season against Dartmouth last month, Harvard baseball coach Joe Walsh was asked one of those difficult questions that has no right answer.

"Do you think your team was the best in the Ivy League this year?"

Usually quick with a sharp-witted reply, Walsh could not help but tiptoe politely around this one.

How could he say yes? The Crimson had just dropped three of four games in a weekend series with the Big Green, blowing its chance to clinch the division title and ending the year just one game above .500 in the Ivy standings.

Best in the Ivies? More like middle-of-the-pack.

But as Walsh knew, pointing simply to the Crimson's record (18-26, 11-9 Ivy) and its third-place finish in the Red Rolfe Division would have been selling his team short. This was a team that sat in first place until the last week of the season and finished at or near the top of the league in batting average (.296), stolen bases (48) and homers (30). Harvard's pitchers posted an impressive 4.26 ERA, holding other teams' hitters to just a .273 average.

By comparison, the team that eventually went on to win the Ivy League-Princeton-had a pitching staff with a 6.40 ERA. Opposing hitters pounded the Tigers at a .332 clip. In its two meetings with the Tigers this year, the Crimson beat them 6-2 and very easily could have taken the second game, but fell 3-2 in extra innings.

So was Harvard the league's best team? It certainly seemed so at times.

The Crimson offense-which hit for a league-worst .258 average last year-was rejuvenated in 2001. Junior third baseman Nick Carter emerged as one of the finest all-around hitters in New England, leading the team in almost every offensive category. Shortstop Mark Mager was again a hit machine, batting .343 on the year. Senior Joe Llanes and sophomore Brian Lentz both scored and knocked in at least 20 runs apiece, while junior outfielder Javy Lopez bounced back from a devastating freshman-year eye injury to hit .314.

As the season progressed, the Crimson also received more and more production from its rookies. Switch-hitting Trey Hendricks was thrown into the fire immediately, but responded well, hitting .300 with 23 RBI out of the cleanup spot. After struggling at the plate in the early-going, freshman center fielder Bryan Hale clubbed five home runs in one week's time and by the end of the year, raised his average up to a respectable .270.

By the time the heart of the Ivy schedule rolled around, the Harvard lineup was wreaking havoc on opposing pitchers, all the while receiving one solid outing after another from its own staff. After splitting its games with its first four Ivy opponents, the Crimson took three out of four in its series with both Brown and Yale. During the most important stretch of the season, the Crimson was playing its best baseball of the year.

Then came the Lost Weekend.

Harvard had needed to simply split its four games with Dartmouth to assure itself of at least at least a tie for first place. That seemed a fairly manageable task since the Crimson had done no worse nor split in any of its five series with Ivy opponents up to that point.

But against Dartmouth, the Crimson broke down one game at a time. In the series opener, sophomore lefthander Kenon Ronz was not at all his usual self, and sophomore reliever Barry Wahlberg fared even worse, as Dartmouth jumped out to an 11-1 lead. The Crimson bats rallied for seven runs in its next trip to the plate to trim the deficit to 11-8, but Dartmouth's advantage proved too great. The Crimson fell 11-9.

In the second game, a three-run homer by Lentz-his second of the day-gave Harvard a 5-2 lead after seven and a half innings of play. That seemed to provide all the run support necessary for junior starter Justin Nyweide, who was cruising along just as he had done all season. But Nyweide tired in the bottom of the eighth, and Dartmouth's Brian Nickerson connected for a three-run homer that tied the game at five. A solo homer by Dartmouth's Mike Levy in the tenth off of Harvard senior John Birtwell-who had come on in relief-gave Dartmouth a momentous, come-from-behind win.

The very next day, Harvard-facing elimination from the postseason-suffered its most devastating loss of the year. Leading 2-1 in the final inning, Birtwell was two outs away from nailing down the complete-game victory. But with the tying run on second base, Birtwell left a pitch out too far over the plate to Nickerson, who once again made the Crimson pay. His RBI-double sent the game into extra frames.

In the top of the tenth, Dartmouth tagged Birtwell for two runs to take a 4-2 lead. Harvard went down in order in the home half of the inning, and that was the game. Not to mention the season. The division title had slipped through Harvard's fingers.

Later that week, the season-ending Beanpot Tournament provided a regrettable conclusion to the 2001 campaign. The Crimson dropped both its games at Fenway Park, including a 9-8 loss to the same UMass team it had buried 22-11 the previous week. Harvard returned home as the last-place finisher in the Beanpot and a paler version of the team it had been just five games before.

"We played so well a couple weeks ago, I hadn't even thought about the season ending. I figured it would be going longer," senior outfielder Scott Carmack said after Harvard's final game. "It didn't work out that way. It's like a season cut short."

Harvard now faces the prospect of coming into next season minus half of its stellar starting rotation. Birtwell, an all-Ivy First Team pick in his senior season, is lost to graduation. Meanwhile, junior Ben Crockett-who attracted throngs of scouts to his starts all year long-may decide to leave school early and pursue a major league career.

If so, his final appearance in a Harvard uniform will have been a no-hitter. In the series finale against Dartmouth, Crockett struck out a career-best 14 Big Green hitters and faced just one batter over the minimum. His magnificent performance would have been a perfect game if not for an error committed on a fly ball that allowed the Big Green's lone baserunner to reach.

The error, though, came in the second inning, well before anyone had starting thinking about the possibility of a perfect game.

So close to perfection, and yet so far away-it was the story of Crockett's no-hit masterpiece, as well as the Crimson's season.