AOTW: Hendricks Throws Gem of a Game

At first, it seems surprising that Trey Hendricks wasn’t thinking at least a little bit about last year when he took the mound at Clarke Field on Sunday.

After all, he was facing off against the same Princeton team that took two of three games from the Crimson in the 2003 Ivy Championship Series to end Harvard’s season on that very diamond just 10 months earlier. Hendricks had been forced to watch that game in street clothes, sidelined with a season-ending knee injury, as the Tigers celebrated a title that the Crimson has always claimed to be its own rightful property.

But by the end of Sunday’s doubleheader, it was crystal clear why Hendricks wasn’t thinking about the heart-breaking past.

The present is just too darn good.

The co-captain hurled a complete game gem of a two-hitter to propel Harvard (9-8-1, 3-1 Ivy) to a 4-1 victory and seal a two-game sweep of the hated Tigers. Along the way he racked up eight strikeouts over nine innings, and lowered his spring break ERA to an anemic 1.06.

“It seemed like any other game to me,” said Hendricks, who silenced the dangerous top half of the Tigers lineup—including potential first-rounder B.J. Szymanski, who was 0-4 with a strikeout. The right-hander held the one through four hitters to a combined 0-16 with 5 Ks.

But his second complete game of the Break was only the finishing touch on a record-breaking weekend for Hendricks.

On Saturday, the senior switch-hitter went 2-3 in both games of a doubleheader against Cornell, and in the process hit safely in his 22nd consecutive game—a new Harvard record.

And just as the Crimson now stands atop the Red Rolfe division standings, Hendricks leads his team in virtually every statistical category—hitting and pitching.

He leads the squad in batting average (.457), slugging (.729), on-base percentage (.487) and RBI (20), and leads all starting pitchers in wins (3), ERA (4.09), innings pitched (29) and strikeout-to-walk ratio (22-6).

Hendricks is literally doing it all for the Crimson.

Except, of course, worrying about last season.