Morgalis Signs On As Impact Transfer

You might expect a more dignified nickname for a 6’5, opening day starter with a fastball that can hit 90, yet “Mikey Mo” will have to suffice. At least it’s better than “Cindy,” the tag that his Notre Dame teammates gave him in honor of the supermodel with the similar last name of Margolis.

But Fighting Irish transfer Michael Morgalis wanted to leave more than just his nickname in South Bend. After just two appearances as a freshman and none as a sophomore, Morgalis jumped ship in search of more playing time—and found it at Harvard.

“I would be lying if I said [the transfer] wasn’t for baseball,” Morgalis says. “It was really frustrating to be at Notre Dame, knowing I was good enough to play there, and my coach kind of just told me that as long as I stayed there, I wouldn’t play. And as an athlete who has spent a lot of his years playing that sport, to be told that is pretty devastating.”

After solid showings during off-season practices, Morgalis faltered during his fall outing in the Blue-Gold series last year, Notre Dame’s annual intrasquad scrimmages. It didn’t help that the class below him, which Baseball America named the top recruiting class in the nation, featured five pitchers who were drafted.

“During the Blue-Gold series I essentially got destroyed,” Morgalis says. “We had meetings afterwards, and that meeting was basically what made me transfer because I had a good fall, but all the coach talked about during the meeting was how bad I did in that one outing. So basically that was the excuse he needed to tell me that I wasn’t going to play.”

Since Morgalis didn’t record a single inning for the Irish last season, he maintained that year of eligibility for baseball for his current sophomore standing. Academically, he is a first semester junior, as only some of his business school credits transferred to Harvard.

“Mike kind of got caught up in the numbers game, and the younger players had more talent,” Notre Dame coach Paul Mainieri noted. “We would have loved to see him get a degree from Notre Dame because he’s such a good student, but we thought if he could he should look into going somewhere without sacrificing academics and getting an opportunity to play.”

“He’s a good arm, a competitor, a great person and a great teammate,” Mainieri added. “I wish him all the best.”

Harvard coach Joe Walsh, on the other hand, has just found a new excuse to visit Ohio.

“I haven’t been to Cincinnati yet—that’s where he’s from—but I’m going to start looking for players there now,” Walsh says.

Maddux, Only Bigger

Though he hesitates to draw a direct comparison between Morgalis and the relatively diminutive Atlanta Braves’ righty Greg Maddux, Walsh paid his pitcher the ultimate compliment by very nearly doing so.

“Maddux is one of those guys that throws 84, 86,” Walsh says. “Then all of a sudden—whoom! He comes in with an 88, 89. Mike can do the same, in that he pitches up. He’ll be sitting 85, 87, and then you get that tough guy, and he lets it go and brings a 90 a few times during a ballgame. That’s very unusual to see a kid who can pitch up.”

Along with his ability to muster the extra gas on his fastball when needed, Morgalis has a change-up and a slider—which Walsh calls “nasty”—in his arsenal. He also works quickly and throws mostly strikes, keeping his fielders on their toes.

“I go after people, and a lot of time they’re going to swing at pitches that they don’t really want to swing at and get themselves out,” Morgalis says. “It helps your teammates stay awake, and then all of a sudden it’s the fifth inning and you’ve only thrown 60 pitches, and you get to play a few more innings.”

Morgalis’ personal goal is consistency—perhaps as a safeguard to maintaining a prominent place in the rotation.

“I feel like if there was one thing at Notre Dame they could have really said, ‘Okay this is why you’re not playing,’ is because one day I did really well, and the next day I did so-so,” Morgalis says. “I just want to stay pretty good so there’s no reason why I can’t play.”

Instrumental to staying consistent will be control over his pitches and using all three to keep batters honest. According to Walsh, Morgalis boasts the ability to get ahead of hitters with any pitch and then deploys a very Maddux-esque method of reading batters. “He can see hitters’ tendencies,” Walsh said. “A lot of times catchers pick it up—Mike seems to pick up right away with the guy’s swing, ‘Hey I can bust him inside,’ or ‘he’s looking to pull, we’ll go away on him for a while.’ Very smart guy on the mound.”

The addition of such a smart pitcher helps cushion the blow from the departure of staff ace Ben Crockett ’02.

“He’s going to do wonders for our pitching staff if he stays healthy this year,” captain Barry Wahlberg says. “He has the potential to be, I think, an All-Ivy type candidate. He’s a guy that battles, a guy that doesn’t give up.”

“I can’t say enough about the kid personally, how smart he is and how much he respects the game,” Wahlberg adds.

Morgalis started the season impressively, allowing just two runs in seven innings against Holy Cross in the Crimson’s opening day 3-2 win. But Morgalis has struggled since then, getting torched for six runs on six hits in a 10-2 drubbing by Rutgers on March 21 and then surrendering five runs in 4.1 innings in a 10-9 loss against No. 13 Miami on March 27.

His first win finally came in last weekend’s Ivy opener. In a solid showing, Morgalis allowed three earned runs over 5.2 innings in an 11-6 victory over Penn.

Northeast by Midwest

Raised in the Cincinnati suburb of Blue Ash, Morgalis began playing tee-ball at age six. He became exclusively a pitcher by the time he reached Sycamore High School, but his competitive streak had been established well before then.

Morgalis’ motto can be summed up with a t-shirt he wore in second grade, which proclaimed “If I can’t win, then I won’t play.”

“When I was 10, we were in a tournament, and I was pitching,” Morgalis recalls of his local team. “My team made like six errors in a row, and we were getting crushed, and my coach wouldn’t take me out. So I call time, put the ball on the mound, and walked into the dugout. I just couldn’t take it.”

While pitching, Morgalis keeps loose on the mound by singing to himself and stays focused between innings by not talking to his teammates. But as intense as he is about baseball, the first word Morgalis picks to describe himself is goofy. After getting rocked by major leaguers during a game between the Fighting Irish and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, he describes his performance as “a little shaky” with a grin.

“They hit the ball a long way,” he said. “I think I gave up four runs in two-thirds of an inning. It was so much fun.”

With such a wicked sense of humor, Morgalis considers holds no topic sacred.

“I would classify my parents as the most unathletic people one could ever meet,” Morgalis says. “I think my dad was in the high school band; that was the extent of his athleticism. My mom was always the last picked in gym class.”

Confessing confusion over the origin of his own athletic skills—he played three sports in high school—Morgalis more than made up for suspect beginnings with his baseball prowess. He played for Midland during the summers from age 14 to 18, and the 90-game schedules which dominated his life paid off with a national championship when he was 17. His most memorable baseball moments came while on the Notre Dame team which advanced to the College World Series his freshman year.

For all his success on the diamond, Morgalis has plans that go beyond baseball. A former class president and founder of the Republican Club at Sycamore, he’s aiming for law school after graduation and eventually aspires to hold national office. His heroes include his parents, whom he admires for “letting [my sisters and me] do what we want, screwing up and learning from it,” and Mike Maundrell, his coach from his teenage years.

“I liked his approach to the game and the way he taught me how to play,” Morgalis says of Maundrell. “On top of that he was a big time attorney, so I saw that balance.”

Currently, however, Morgalis is more focused on balancing baseball with academics than pre-law and beyond.

“A peace comes over my body when I’m on the baseball field,” he says. “Baseball is a part of me, especially here, that you can have so much fun with. This place is full of stress, everything about it, so to walk over that river [from the campus to the athletic fields], it’s a total transformation into me being me.”

One specific form of stress relief Morgalis cites is the Kangaroo Court that the team’s seniors set up to extract “fines” to fund an end-of-season celebration. Morgalis has had his share of penalties because of the “stupid sayings” that spout so readily from his mouth.

Perhaps more fitting than the sayings, however, Morgalis earned himself a new nickname, courtesy of his appointed role of treasurer—look out for Mikey “Crowbar” Morgalis, coming soon to a ballot near you.

—Staff writer Brenda E. Lee can be reached at fas.harvard.edu.