Baseball Falls Just One Game Short

There was Harvard baseball coach Joe Walsh, stoically positioned in front of O’Donnell Field’s home dugout, clearly choked up.

There he was, ignoring the miserably biting wind, the lifeless cold, the crooked numbers on the scoreboard and the empty seats. Northeastern had just pounded Harvard on the last game of the season, 12-6, in a non-conference makeup that hadn’t meant a lick. But it hurt.

Walsh took a moment to collect himself, then gathered the team for a final meeting. He cleared his throat to talk, but his voice faltered. Against the elements, against the dejection that should have come from a season capsized in the final week, the largeness of Walsh’s pride in his Crimson ballplayers shone through.

“I told them that I thought we played the last couple of weekends like warriors,” Walsh said after the meeting, sincere as ever. “I thought we came out there, and we were warriors.”

The story of the season. Words like “warrior” and “soldier” get thrown around quite a bit in sports—perhaps more than many would care to hear—but if there ever was a team that went down fighting, it was the 2004 version of Harvard baseball.

The Crimson (21-18-1, 13-7 Ivy) entered the Ivy season’s final weekend two games behind Dartmouth in the Red Rolfe division standings, needing three wins out of four against the Big Green—the nation’s hottest-hitting team at the time—to force a one-game playoff.

Harvard took Dartmouth down to the very last game, coming up excruciatingly short—by a score of 7-2—in the end. That was the unfortunate finale of two exhilarating weeks of offensive fireworks, cathartic comebacks and late-inning heroics.

In the end, the season’s final turn of fortunes did little to overshadow the spring of 2004’s many positives for Harvard baseball.

For one, there was the emergence of Zak Farkes, the sophomore middle infielder whose assault on the Harvard record-books, for a stretch, transcended wins and losses. Farkes blasted four home runs against Dartmouth in the final weekend, shattering the 34-year-old school single-season record. The last of them, a missile into the trees beyond Dartmouth’s Red Rolfe Field, broke the school career record of 21.

Two, there was the quiet leadership of the team captains, Trey Hendricks and Bryan Hale. Hendricks led the Ivy League in batting average (.427) and pitching wins (nine)—one of them, a complete game shutout of Dartmouth on May 2, kept Harvard’s season alive—and was voted Ivy League Pitcher of the Year. Hale, a senior from Seattle, played spectacular centerfield defense the entire year, making the most difficult plays appear easy; the most strenuous, merely graceful. His two highlight-reel catches against Brown on April 25—the last of which, a dive on the warning track gravel, inspired Walsh to praise his “fearlessness”—energized the team for the stretch run.

Three, there was the powerful offensive supporting cast that led Harvard to a 2-0 sweep of eventual Ivy League champion Princeton, a 21-18-1 record against conference and non-conference opponents, and a 14-8 record against the Ivy League. Both marks were Harvard’s best in five years. The Crimson led the league in home runs, paced by league leader Farkes (14), junior Schuyler Mann (11) and Hendricks (seven).

Harvard loses four seniors this year, including Hendricks, Hale, and starting pitchers Mike Morgalis and Jason Brown. All four cogs will be difficult to replace for a repeat-run at the Ivy title in 2005.

IVY DANCE

Harvard baseball opened the 2004 season on a Texas-sized offensive binge in Lubbock but struggled to find its groove, wrapping up the non-conference schedule with a losing record (6-7-1).

The Crimson hit its stride on April 3, when Morgalis’ nine-inning shutout against Cornell ushered in a stretch of outstanding pitching.

From that game until April 17, the Crimson allowed 2.43 runs per game against Ivy opponents, winning seven straight and taking a two-game lead in the Red Rolfe division. Morgalis and Hendricks earned victories in four of those seven—including Hendricks’ two-hitter against projected first-round draft pick B.J. Szymanski and Princeton, 4-1, which completed a two-game sweep of the Tigers. Szymanski, likely to be the second position player taken in the June amateur draft to Florida State’s Stephen Drew, went 0-for-4.

Harvard’s good fortune soon ran dry.

On April 17-18, the Crimson lost three straight at Yale, losing possession of the Red Rolfe lead to Dartmouth—a lead it wouldn’t take back. After salvaging the series finale, Harvard was one game behind Dartmouth with the Beanpot in Brockton, Mass. coming up and two Ivy weekends to go.

The Crimson lost to Boston College in the first game of the non-conference Beanpot, but won against UMass the next day with a dramatic walk-off home run by Farkes.

THE 11th HOUR

Seemingly reenergized, the Crimson nonetheless lost the first of four against Brown, 9-6, on April 24 and appeared headed towards a Game 2 defeat to the Bears in the afternoon.

Trailing 9-3 heading into the bottom of the eigth inning, Harvard needed a miracle to keep its season alive, already down two games in the standings to Dartmouth, which had swept Yale earlier.

It found one.

The Crimson scored six in the eighth, then won the game in the bottom of the ninth on a walk-off ground-rule double by Hendricks. And after winning Game 3 by a score of 5-2 early on Sunday, they did it again in their last at-bat in Game 4, winning 9-8—this time on a game-winning Ian Wallace suicide squeeze.

“I’ll tell you what,” Walsh said, “every time we play Brown, it is unbelievable.”

Harvard faced a two-game deficit in the standings entering the next weekend’s four-game, home-and-home series against Dartmouth. Harvard needed to sweep—or at least take three of four to force a playoff.

They won the first game, 20-9, behind two Farkes home runs, but then lost a heartbreaker in Game 2, 13-10—with Harvard-killer and Big Green left fielder Scott Shirrell hitting a game-winning, three-run homer off Hendricks in relief.

Hendricks got sweet redemption in Hanover on May 2, pitching a 5-0 gem, bringing the Crimson within one game of the lead. But in the nightcap Dartmouth’s Stephen Perry pitched a complete game, holding Harvard to two runs, earning a 7-2 victory, and clinching the Red Rolfe division title for the Big Green.

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu.