Baseball Saves Best for Last With Shakir

So you’re Harvard Coach Joe Walsh, and it’s time to make out your Opening Day lineup card. Where, you wonder, should you plug in your slap-artist second baseman Faiz Shakir—a career .291 hitter and the team’s leader in stolen bases last season?

Last, of course.

Last? Well, when you have one of the league’s best contact hitters in senior Mark Mager (who struck out just once every 9.5 plate appearances in 2001) and on-base machine Javy Lopez (.400 OBP last year) pegged for the top two spots in the order, then the nine-hole suddenly seems like the perfect fit. For each cycle through the batting order after the first one, you have three table-setters instead of two.

“The eight and nine hitters in our lineup are basically our second top of the order,” Mager says.

In that case, you might consider Shakir Harvard’s second leadoff hitter.

“For our team, the first and the ninth hitter are basically interchangeable,” explains Lopez, who has seen time in both spots. “What Coach Walsh tries to do is evenly distribute the speed throughout the lineup to stay out of the double play.”

That philosophy works well with Harvard’s roster, full of smart, fleet-footed hitters who can hit in any situation. Shakir is no exception.

“Faiz can do a lot of things—he can hit-and-run and work the count,” Mager said. “He’s real versatile.”

Shakir also has a history of doing damage out of the ninth hole.

Three years ago, Harvard was trailing 4-3 in the ninth inning of the deciding game of its Ivy championship series against Princeton. The Crimson was just two outs away from elimination, and the Tigers had their top reliever on the hill.

With the bases loaded, up to the plate strode Shakir—all 5 feet, 9 inches of him.

“I was looking to see if Coach was going to call for someone else off the bench,” he recalls. “But I looked over at him [in the third base coach’s box] and he just clapped his hands and said, ‘Let’s go.’”

It was an important vote of confidence for Shakir, who hadn’t expected to be in the lineup at all that day.

Mostly known for his defense, Shakir had gotten the starting nod in the first game of the series after bone chips sidelined regular Peter Woodfork ’99, but he had a less than spectacular outing. Shakir struck out twice and made an unsightly throwing error on a ground ball to second.

When Woodfork was declared healthy enough to play in game two, Shakir sat. He wasn’t expecting much better when he arrived at the ballpark for the decisive third game—especially when, upon first glancing at the lineup card posted in the clubhouse, he saw Woodfork’s name penciled in at the top of the order.

Then he scanned further down the lineup.

“I saw my name, batting ninth at DH,” Shakir said. “It was the first time I had ever DH’ed.”

Shakir may have been surprised—“I was the last guy on the bench for most of that year,” he says—but Walsh recognized a hot bat when he saw one. After earning a surprise start in the second game of a doubleheader against Yale that April, Shakir went on a late-season tear that raised his average to .355.

Shakir rode that hot streak into the postseason. In that crucial at-bat against Princeton, he lofted the second pitch over the drawn-in infield for a two-run single, giving Harvard the lead—and the title.

After the game, Shakir called it the greatest moment of his young career. Three years later, the memory still causes some goosebumps.

“There are a some things I definitely remember from freshman year—that’s one of them,” he said.

One year after Shakir’s clutch performance, he emerged as Harvard’s starting second baseman. As a sophomore, he had the second-best average on the team, enjoying a 13-game hitting streak in April. His performance earned him honorable mention to the All-Ivy team.

Shakir has also become a stabilizing presence up the middle. He and Mager—the guts of Harvard’s all-senior infield—form one of the league’s most reliable double-play combinations. Mager says the two bring out the best in each other.

“We just have a chemistry,” Mager said. “There’s no one I’d rather play next to.”

Their cooperation pays off at the plate, as well.

“Faiz and I always like to be hitting next to each other because if one of us gets on base, the other can do some situational hitting and vice versa,” Mager said.

Shakir says he prefers the top of the order to the bottom because it usually means an extra at-bat per game. Still, he points out that batting ninth has its advantages—like the luxury of being more aggressive at the plate.

“I like to swing at the first pitch,” Shakir said. “It’s usually a good one to hit. When you’re hitting leadoff or second, you want to take more pitches to get a read on the pitcher.”

Shakir’s aggressiveness paid off in game one of last Sunday’s doubleheader against Cornell, when he collected a team-high three hits. He also knocked in two runs and scored two more.

It was a breakthrough game for Shakir, who had been mired in a 1-for-30 slump entering the weekend.

Shakir says his slow start at the plate was largely due to a mechanical flaw in his swing that had him popping up a lot of pitches. He first picked up on the problem in the team’s opening series at Rice but took a while to shake the habit.

The nine hole turned out to be the safest spot to iron out the kinks.

“If you’re struggling, [the ninth spot] is a good place to be because you see a lot of fastballs down there,” Mager said. “For Faiz, it may have helped take some of the pressure off so he could just be relaxed.

“Faiz was just hitting a lot of balls at people.... Everyone on the team knew Faiz was going to come around because he has such a good swing. He did on Sunday.”

Following his 3-for-5 performance in the first game of Sunday’s doubleheader, Shakir was moved up to the two-hole in the nightcap. It was just his third time this season batting second.

Was it a promotion? No more than hitting ninth is a demotion.

“Maybe on other teams it is [a demotion] to hit ninth, but not on ours,” Lopez says.

So where will Shakir hit today in Harvard’s game at Holy Cross? It may not even matter. Wherever he is, he’ll be the same catalyst as always.

And if he ends up back in the nine-hole, then pity the Crusaders’ starter. Because just as soon as he reaches the bottom of the Crimson order, his troubles are beginning all over again.