Saved by the Bell: Baseball's Rut Deepens

BOSTON—Routine.

The word represents both the hallmark of a quality baseball team and a potentially devastating rut. A club on a good roll can dispatch opponents with routine efficiency—string hits together consistently, make the necessary plays in the field—until whole stretches of the season disappear into blurs of modest high-fives and W’s.

Routine outings for quality starters, hitters who converted on routine sacrifices and other more banal aspects of the game defined the character of the Harvard baseball team when it won four straight Red Rolfe Division titles, the last in 1999.

But routine can also sap the life out of a team. When a lineup lacks fire and urgency—when opponents are able to make it through nine innings without breaking a sweat in the field—games drag on without the promise of the late-inning rally that is always theoretically possible in the absence of a clock. Games go on until they’re done, not until they’ve become something. Hit the field, play the game, maybe win, go home. Routine.

The latter tendency often happens independent of preparation and effort, and that’s what makes Harvard’s season-long hitting slump so frustrating.

The Crimson lineup isn’t lacking in leadership or talent. But in yesterday’s opening game of the Beanpot Tournament—played at one of the least routine playing venues a player on any level can set foot in—Northeastern’s Matt Piryk held everyone on the Crimson not named Trey Hendricks hitless through six innings. Hendricks went 3-for-5 on the day, but the rest of the team wasn’t able to get much going until the Crimson was already in a 7-0 hole.

Harvard is now hitting .242 on the year, despite averaging over ten hits a game in four games this weekend and during its four-game sweep the weekend before. But it’s the way that it’s happening that’s worrisome.

“None of our outs were hard outs,” Harvard Coach Joe Walsh said after yesterday’s pop-up and fly-out-filled loss. “They were all routine outs. We just don’t hit enough.”

So how do you break out of that? You mix things up when you do get on base. You give sophomore Bryan Hale the green light to steal second with two outs. Or, you tell senior Chaney Sheffield to bunt his way aboard with two outs in the seventh, runners on first and third and hot-swinging senior Mark Mager in the on-deck circle.

But when Huskies catcher Colin Gaynor guns Hale down at second—his first such play this year—and Sheffield is called out at first on a controversial call, you’re at a loss for answers.

“We’re just not playing good baseball right now,” Walsh said. It was something he also said Sunday afternoon. It’s a routine he’d like to get away from.

Routine. Two routine outs yesterday were among the more comforting the Crimson has recorded all season. With one out and the bases loaded for Northeastern in the top of the ninth, junior Kenon Ronz came in to preserve whatever infinitesimal hopes the Crimson harbored for a rally. He struck out Mike Steinberg, a .326 hitter this season, before inducing Brad Czarnowski to ground out, ending the threat.

Ronz has been limited by bicep tendonitis for much of the year, and only made three brief appearances before yesterday in which he gave up a combined four longballs. One of them was a disastrous two-homer, no-out meltdown that sank the Crimson against Penn on Saturday.

Ronz has talent. He had jumped out to a great start last season before faltering down the stretch, and had good enough stuff to garner an invitation to the prestigious Cape Cod League the past two summers.

Although his fastball isn’t yet what it was, going out and doing well in that kind of pressure situation should do something for his confidence as he heals. With any luck, getting people out and going deep into games as a starter will soon be a regular occurrence for Ronz again.

Tied atop the Red Rolfe Division with Brown at 5-3, there isn’t a reason to write the Crimson off yet. And the Beanpot, for all its prestige, isn’t exactly the most critical part of the season.

And yet, heading into a pivotal four-game set with Yale this weekend, today’s home game against B.C. screams for a change in routine.