STAIRWAY TO EVAN: Dunster House and Sox Connect

With yet another season now underway, a memorable plotline has reappered this spring. Once again, a team from New England that has five championships which has recently come under the leadership of a young manager and has made several key off-season acquisitions, is going to be one of the favorites to win the title, if it can hold off a club which has won over a quarter of the championships since the league began.

This scenario may sound awfully familiar to anyone who follows the Red Sox or the MLB. It’s also the situation for a team and a league a bit closer to Harvard Square.

That’s right, with the 2004 spring House intramural season now underway, long-suffering and currently second-place Dunster seem to have found some a surprising number of connections with the unlucky Boys from Beantown, complete with a New York Yankees type rival in Kirkland.

Just ask the residents of Dunster, who realize how far the similarities seem to go.

“Like the Red Sox, we have all the pieces to the puzzle now [to win the championship],” said junior Aaron Byrd, a safety on the football team and D-house resident.

One of those factors that Byrd is referring to which has shot Dunster up in the standings—it now sits just six points behind league-leading Eliot—has been the influx of a strong sophomore class. Like the Sox, these new team members are filling in a critical area for the Moose, as they have boosted the participation level for the House to unheard of figures, and propelled team championships in football and b-league basketball.

“You could equate [the stronger Sox pitching] with our stronger sophomore class,” Byrd said, in reference to Boston’s acquisition of the Arizona Diamonback’s Curt Schilling and the Oakland Athletics Keith Foulke, who fill in a bullpen that was in desperate need of a strong fifth starter and reliable closer.

Of course, there are some striking similarities between the leading men of these two clubs. Like the Red Sox’s general manager Theo Epstein, Dunster’s Assistant Senior Tutor Carlos E. Diaz Rosillo is entering his second season as the organization’s top position, is an Ivy League graduate and has brought a renewed energy back into his clubhouse.

“I have nothing but the deepest respect for Carlos,” crew tri-captain Michael Alperovich said. “He’s an incredible person and an incredible motivator.”

And like Epstein, Diaz Rosillo’s reputation has spread far beyond his immediate domain.

“He’s just gung-ho about IM’s,” said Eliot resident BreeAnna Gibson, one of the four head refs for the IM program and co-captain of the women’s track team.

And then there’s the whole Yankees-Kirkland connection. Like the Bronx Bombers, Kirkland—currently in fourth place in the House standings—has dominated the Strauss Cup history, having won 20 championships since the beginning of the competition in 1937. In the same time, the Yanks have won 21 World Series. Such numbers are monumental in comparison to Dunster and the Red Sox, who have won just five Strauss Cups and World Series, respectively, but none for at least forty years.

But the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry never broke out into an all-out war, like Kirkland and Dunster did earlier this year.

Still, all that waiting and bad blood between the two houses will probably make winning all the sweeter for D-house, some of whose members were unwilling to comment on just what exactly they’ll do should they achieve the ultimate IM glory, but it seems that the celebration would certainly have some Red Sox flavor.

“When the Red Sox beat the [Oakland] A’s [in the ALDS last year] we rioted in Harvard Square,” Byrd said. “If Dunster wins the Strauss Cup, we will riot.”

So if all of these Red Sox-Dunster, Yankees-Kirkland connections have you seeing double this spring and left you confused about who to cheer for, just remember that it’s Kirkland who has the stronger connection to a ball club that is also known as the “Evil Empire.”

—Staff writer Evan R. Johnson can be reached at erjohns@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.